FBI Finishes Another of Its Specialties, A Sham "Investigation" That Is Actually A Cover-Up

Under pressure from the public, the media, and Democrats, in that order of concern, Trump ordered the FBI on September 28 to conduct a limited "supplemental" background check as an addition to their previous checks that failed to report on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's debauched, violent youth.

Kavanaugh has undergone previous such checks in order to work in the Bush White House on sensitive political programs (such as torture) requiring lying and stealth, and when Bush rewarded him by planting him on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the second most important court in the U.S. that in practice has the final word on many vital matters. (The Supreme Court refuses to even consider 90% plus of the cases litigants attempt to appeal to it. Contrary to popular delusion, one CANNOT "appeal all the way to the Supreme Court." Take four months of vacation time a year, the "Justices" only accept about 90 cases a year for review. And most of those are of minor import.)

The FBI was given just a week to carry out this latest whitewash. It finished two days early, on October 3rd. Senate boss Mitch McConnell then said there would be a vote by the full Senate on October 5th. The single copy of the FBI report would be reviewed in a "secure" room by a few Senators at a time, who would have to memorize its contents. (No cellphones or cameras allowed.) McConnell averred that this was "plenty of time" for the 100 Senators to review the report! ("The" media reported this absurdity matter-of-factly, as if there was nothing wrong with it.)

The FBI only interviewed 6 people: 4 friends of violent criminal Kavanaugh, a friend of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's ( whom he attempted to rape when she was 15), and Deborah Ramirez, who was molested by Kavanaugh at Yale University. (He shoved his bare genitals in her face.) The FBI ignored a list of 20 corroborating witnesses provided by Ramirez. They also failed to interview Kavanaugh or Dr. Ford. (Sparing Kavanaugh from committing a felony by lying to the FBI, which carries a five year prison sentence. Not that he would have been prosecuted. Unless the Democrats somehow take over the executive branch by winning the presidency. Kavanaugh's squirming evasions when asked repeatedly by a Democratic Senator on the Judiciary Committee if he would call for an FBI investigation clearly shows he is well aware of the peril of talking to the FBI.)

The FBI specializes in sham investigations when state crimes need hiding. Examples includes the CIA assassinations of John Kennedy (1963), Robert Kennedy (1968), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), its own massacre of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, and numerous political assassinations and other crimes.

U.S. broadcast media has once again done a tremendous disservice by omitting the critical details and instead making it a "he said- she said" story. Not only Kavanaugh vs. Ford, but Republicans vs. Democrats. Republicans say enough time has been wasted (McConnell, and the awful Senator Lindsey Graham, a vicious, rabid cur), Democrats say the investigation was superficial and the vote is being rushed.

McConnell is the same guy who prevented the previous president, the Democrat Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy for almost a year. Which makes McConnell's talk of "wasting time" and his rush now all the more galling. That vacant seat was filled by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, the spawn of Reagan EPA head and zealous anti-environmentalist Anne Gorsuch Burford.

Of course Kavanaugh was just one of 25 interchangeable, extreme reactionaries on the list of Supreme Court candidates the loathsome Federalist Society handed to Trump to pick from. Interesting that Trump chose a fellow sexual predator. He must have sensed a kindred soul. It has also been reported that Kavanaugh has lately adopted a "legal theory" of presidential immunity from prosecution- interesting, since he had exactly the opposite attitude when he was a henchman of Kenneth Starr's in Starr's Get Clinton operation. But I guess we must await a greater legal mind to come up with some legerdemain to show why Democratic Presidents should be subject to prosecution but not Republican ones.

Nobel Committee Awards Peace Prize to The International Campaign To Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Forgoing Giving Obama a Second Peace Prize

Remember 2009? Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama had only been in office a matter of months, and the European bourgeoisie were so overjoyed with this allegedly new-model president replacing the execrable George W. Bush that the Swedish Nobel Committee got carried away and giddily awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the newly-minted "good" U.S. president for accomplishing.... absolutely nothing to advance World Peace. [1]


Obama even sprinkled a bit of cold water on the Swedish Nobel poohbahs in his acceptance speech, cautioning that he might have to fight some wars- Good Wars, of course, wars of necessity. (What other kind is there? Throughout history empires have "needed" to conquer and subjugate to add to their wealth, for example. The Third Reich needed to defend "Western Civilization" from the Jewish-Slavic-Bolshevik hordes from the East- they actually said this, and citizens from all over Western Europe and Scandinavia rallied to the cause, joining the Waffen-SS, and helping round up Jewish vermin for extermination in their home countries. War is always "necessary.")

In what in hindsight looks like preordained irony, the 1999 Prize went to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), whose hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, Obama would later bomb as president, murdering medical staff and patients. After MSF complained about it, Obama sent a tank crashing through its gates. Yes, Obama did it. First, he is Commander in Chief of the U.S. armed forces, as specified in the U.S. Constitution. Thus under the doctrine of command responsibility, he is ultimately responsible. Second, he granted the armed forces the leeway to commit such war crimes and atrocities. And they certainly wouldn't have engaged in the second attack days later without the okay from Obama. Thirdly, it is quite possible that such a crime was either initiated by Obama or the Pentagon ran it by him first. MSF had repeatedly given the U.S. military the precise GPS coordinates of its hospital location, so as to avoid any "accidental" attacks. The same foolish thing that Al-Jazeera does, which has facilitated repeated U.S. attacks on its offices. (British Prime Minister and smarmy criminal Tony Blair had to talk then-president George Bush out of bombing Al-Jazeera's headquarter in Qatar, where it is based!) [2] 

Other U.S. presidents have had the noble Nobel bestowed upon them. Jimmy Carter in 2002, 22 years after he left office, for the vague reason of "his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." And the very militaristic and rabidly war-mongering Theodore Roosevelt, in 2006, who at least arguably did something involving creating some actual peace, namely brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese war.


The problem with the Nobel Peace Prizes is that giving them out to so many execrable scumbags (there's a long list, but each one would require an explanation) devalues the legitimate recipients, and there certainly are some of those. In addition to prestige, the prize isn't a mere medal, but comes with 9 million Swedish kroner, about $1,110,000 U.S. at today's exchange rate.

Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Prize in 1964. The FBI tried to blackmail him into committing suicide before accepting it, using surreptitiously-made recordings of his sexual dalliances. By 1968 the U.S. power structure had had enough of him (the Washington Post and New York Times, major organs of and soapboxes for elite opinion, both excoriated him for his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his involvement in labor struggles also marked him as a threat) so the CIA murdered him, with the help of the Memphis police, the FBI playing its usual role of cover-up disguised as "investigation," and the entire U.S. establishment media and power system acting as accomplices to this day.

In fact, there is a lot of history that can be mined by going through the role of Peace Prize recipients. But this essay will be too brief to do that. Basically the recipients can be grouped into two categories: people with some meritorious claim to such a prize, and a rogues' gallery of major criminals and international phonies with fraudulent reputations (such as Elie Wiesel and "Mother" Teresa). I mean, Henry Kissinger? Are you trying to make people nauseous?

The Nobel Committee did find an anti-nuclear weapons group prize-worthy on a previous occasion: 1985, when the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won it. I wonder where they are today?

1]  According to the Nobel Committee, Obama was worthy of the Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." I can't even imagine what they were referring to after Obama had only been in office a few months. After eight years of Obamaism, there's still nothing that fits such an extravagant description.

2]  I covered the MSF atrocity in detail in earlier essays. See the articles under http://jasonzenith.blogspot.com/search?q=doctors+without+borders

"Oooh, that feels so GOOD to get an undeserved award! (And a million bucks in prize money too!")

U.S. Bourgeois Political and Media Elites In A Tizzy Because Trump Said Mean Things About One Of Their Number

Tongues are clucking and fingers are wagging at Donald Trump, the current president of the U.S. (and thus the man in charge of maintaining and expanding U.S. global dominance and preserving the hegemony of billionaires everywhere possible) for insulting Mika Brzezinski.

For something like 99.999% of the world's population, Mika Brzezinski is an unknown person. But U.S. political and media elites, who genuinely feel themselves to be at the center of the universe, have the attitude that they are "everybody." In fact, the words "everyone" and "everybody" have been used in regard to this pathetic contretemps.

For days on end now, if you turn on a radio or television, or look at a news website, you're deluged with the scandal du jour, Trump's Meanness to Mika. The U.S. media actually thinks this is something Important. (Apparently any club, or stick, or twig, with which to beat on Trump, will do.) The Washington Post, the hometown "news"paper of the capital city of the global U.S. empire, has numerous articles on its homepage devoted to this trivial story, all breathless in their outrage, shock, and indignation at the caddish, "inappropriate" (the mildest term of condemnation being used in the deluge of denunciations against Trump) behavior of Trump.

Brzezinski is where she is because her Daddy was the notorious imperialist apparatchik Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish emigre who harbored a lifelong hatred for and grudge against Russia. Brzezinski was the Man with the Plan to sucker-punch the Soviet Union by luring it into invading Afghanistan. In fact, it  is true to say that if it hadn't been for U.S. machinations, the Soviet Union probably would never have invaded that country. The U.S. conspired to place a regime hostile to the S.U. in power in Afghanistan. Brzezinski, who was the "National Security" Advisor to U.S. president James Earl Carter, advised Carter that the Soviets could be sucked into a war in Afghanistan to bloody their nose, as it were, and as "payback" for the U.S.' self-inflicted Vietnam War (really Indochina War, as the U.S. devastated Cambodia and Laos in addition to destroying Vietnam) debacle.

Brzezinski is the co-host of a pointless TV show on MSNBC, hosted by her lover, Joe Scarborough, called, modestly, "Morning Joe." Scarborough was previously a Republican Congressman, so of course he is a right-winger. This ego trip program is centered around Scarborough spouting his opinions- and he has opinions on every topic, free of any special insight or edifying analysis- with others sitting around a table on a studio set to chat, and with power-system guests, meaning various politicians, polemicists, and what passes for "experts" in the pantheon of the U.S. propaganda system.

Scarborough was a Trump enthusiast and booster, but once the bourgeois elite turned against Trump with a vengeance, Scarborough duly sailed his little media boat with the tide and turned against Trump. So both he and his lover/co-host turned into harsh critics of Trump.

Eventually Trump responded as he always does when he perceives hostility or even resistance, with insults. He called Dear Mika "dumb," and this was taken as something beyond the pale by the blatherariat and various politicians. He claimed she turned up at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's personal Florida Xanadu, with her paramour, bleeding from her face from recent plastic surgery. Trump says the duo repeatedly sought admission through the Magic Gates, and were repeatedly turned away. The media elite were duly aghast at the unflattering comments about one of their own. Republican politicians weighed in, harrumphing that Trump should can the trash talk, as it was unseemly, beneath the dignity of the president (it's certainly not beneath Trump's personal dignity!) and, of course, "a distraction" from important matters, like gutting Medicaid for millions of people, lavishing billions in tax reductions on the ultra-rich, neutralizing the Environmental Protection Agency, increasing the military budget by 11%, and so on. (In that case, let's hope the "distractions" continue for however long Trump remains inflicted on the world as U.S. Emperor.)

Scarborough/Brzezinski then retailed a story asserting that Trump's minions threatened them with a hatchet job in the so-called "National Enquirer," controlled by Trump's longtime friend, admirer, and ally, David Pecker, unless they apologized to Trump and called him to beg him to spike the story. The Washington Post helpfully provided an op-ed slot for Joe and Mika to feed this story to the public.

Pecker rules a stable of pseudo-newspapers, burlesque versions of actual newspapers, that are placed weekly in racks right at tens of thousands of supermarket checkout lines. Thus millions of people see their covers and lurid headlines every week, and are at least subliminally influenced by them. Pecker's rags, with their drumbeat of Trump-boosting covers during the campaign for the presidency, no doubt aided Trump's "victory." (He actually lost to Clinton by 2.9 million votes, but under the bizarre system of U.S. "democracy," he won in the so-called Electoral College, which is what counts, not who people actually vote for.) [1]

Trump's side denied the Scarborough/Brzezinski extortion story, but it seems credible to me.

The Epitome of Elegance: the very debonair David Pecker

Even though Trump is besieged by hundreds of media voices and political hacks, he apparently never tires of punching back, and indeed of picking new fights, gratuitously, as when he speciously attacked the Mayor of London in the wake of a terrorist attack there on June 3. [2] I don't see Trump tiring of the constant conflict, because he thrives on it. Unlike what is often said about bullies, he is no coward. In fact, he's a lot gutsier than his predecessor, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, who always, always, shied away from taking on the GOP, and made numerous attempts to appease them. Likewise he rewarded Israeli prime minister Binjamin Netanyahu for heaping years of abuse and insults directed at him with a 10-year, $38 billion dollar gift of U.S. weapons, paid for by American taxpayers. [3]

One could expect no end to the media's high dudgeon against Trump's rudeness to Mika until another factoid comes along for Trump's power establishment enemies to wax indignant and outraged over. Sure enough, something came along, in the form of a dopey 28-second video of Trump tackling someone at a burlesque "professional wrestling" show, with a CNN logo superimposed on the "victim's" head. Trump tweeted the video (allegedly the work of a known white racist) and the media were off to the races again. CNN issued a pained statement about Trump inciting violence against journalists and neglecting the duties of the presidency.

 And all the while, the major propaganda offensive, "Russian meddling/interference in Our Democracy" has been non-stop political theme music for months now. The Democrats and most of the corporate media (and the prime movers behind this campaign, the secret police agencies FBI, CIA, and FBI that are the beating fascist heart of the Deep State) hope to build that into a crescendo that will oust Trump from the White House.

We shall see. This should be interesting. For the objective, perspicacious analysis that reveals the hidden truth, check back here regularly.

Poor Mika and Joe! Bullyboy Donald keeps PICKING on them!

MEANEST President EVER! He hurt Mika's feelings! And he exterminated Native Americans! And lots of Filipinos! And overthrew governments and imposed murderous fascist regimes in those countries! And he NUKED two defenseless cities! And laid waste to Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos! And... Oh wait, that was other presidents. Never mind.....

1]  An example of Pecker using the rags he controls to help Trump was his publication during the GOP presidential primaries of a photo of Ted Cruz's fascist fanatic father next to CIA agent (not CIA officer) Lee Harvey Oswald, with the imputation that Cruz senior was involved in the JFK assassination, for which Oswald was the fall guy. When Trump picked up on this, he was roundly denounced by much of the media blatherariat, who are ever-alert and allergic to any examination of that assassination. (The picture proves nothing about Cruz senior's involvement with the JFK hit, of course.) Ted Cruz was also running for the GOP nomination for president at the time.

For a timely description of Pecker, his "career" as a purveyor of media garbage, and his intimate ties to Trump, see "The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump ," The New Yorker, July 3, 2017 issue.


2]  See "Anti-Muslim Bigot & Demagogue U.S. President Trump Slimes London Mayor After Terrorist Attack," June 5, 2017.

3]  Two caveats to the Obama Cowardly Bully thesis. One is that he was a reactionary, who never had any intention of even trying to enact progressive policies. All his campaign rhetoric to the contrary was standard  Democratic Party deception, perfected over several decades by that vile gang. Second, one wonders if he was trying to "triangulate" in the manner of his predecessor as president, fellow accomplished-con-man Bill "Mass Murderer Times 4" Clinton. Clinton outflanked Congressional Republicans on their right, gutting welfare and instituting 60 new Federal death penalty crimes, among other things. Then-leader of the House GOP, the political mountebank Newt Gingrich, felt compelled to go along. Obama tried something similar with his healthcare "reform," devised originally by the far-right wing Heritage Foundation. To his surprise, the Republicans in Congress adamantly refused to provide even a single vote for it. Apparently Obama hadn't read the news reports of Senate GOP Boss Mitch McConnell stating the Republican priority for the Obama regime- to ensure its "failure." The fact that the Gang Of Plunderers announced in advance their plan for total obstructionism wasn't enough to stop Appeaser-In-Chief Obama from repeatedly trying to craft rightwing legislation they would support. And when Obama was first elected, the Democrats held majorities in both Congressional chambers, and could have enacted progressive legislation. But then, this is a party that has had ample opportunities to repeal the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which is a key factor in the destruction of labor unions in the U.S. Yet they never had.

Unions that continue to support the Democratic Party are the equivalent of abused wives who never leave their abuser.

Still, the thesis stands. Obama consistently kow-towed to the powerful (like the financial industry) and took out his wrath on the weak, such as when he ordered the assassination of the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki (who was driven into exile by the FBI and became a propagandist for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and arranged for the Egyptian secret police to break the arm of peace agitator Medea Benjamin in retaliation for interrupting one of his orotund, mendacious speeches. Or keeping political prisoner and then Army soldier Chelsea Manning naked for a year in a Marine Corps brig prior to being railroaded for revealing U.S. crimes to the world via a document transfer to WikiLeaks. Or the incredible persecution of Julian Assange. Or many more examples. For an excellent documentary on some of the lengths the U.S. has gone to "neutralize" Assange, using Britain and Sweden (and even Assange's native Australia) as willing puppets, see "Sex, Lies and Julian Assange," by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation 4 Corners Program. It used to be available free on youtube, but now you have to pay. I downloaded it before that happened.

For Medea Benjamin, See "Obama Has Egyptian Military Regime Break American Peace Activist's Arm," March 8, 2014, and "Medea Benjamin’s Arm 'Wakes Me Up Every Single Night in Pain,'*" July 2, 2014.

Trump Merely Carrying Out Obama's Bombing Policy in Mosul, Iraq

It should come as no surprise to deluded supporters of the Democratic Party, yet it would if they'd ever let the facts into their brains (which they won't), but Trump is just continuing Obama's bombing policy in Mosul, a policy that slaughters dozens or more civilians for each ISIS sniper "taken out" (as U.S. slang for kill has it).

Anand Gopal of The Nation Institute (a project of The Nation magazine) let this particular cat out of the bag in an interview on Democracy Now! Gopal had recently returned from iraq.

Here is a key quote from Gopal:

"What Trump has been doing in Iraq is essentially carrying out Obama's policy. It seems from here like it's an escalation but it's actually not an escalation....Obama actually relaxed the rules of engagement a number of times including most recently in late December, when he made it easier for forces on the ground to call in airstrikes, and I think this is actually the biggest cause for the spike in civilian casualties nothing that Trump has done." [My emphasis.] [1]

Yet Obama is still allowed to shelter his brutal butchery behind his mask of benignness, thoughtfulness, and sham progressivism.

This strategy is totally unnecessary militarily. Instead of employing countersnipers to kill ISIS snipers, or using a more appropriate ordnance to do the job, the U.S. drops heavy explosives from the air, demolishing buildings and slaughtering scores of civilians sheltering in basements. These airstrikes are often called in by U.S. “Special Forces” on the ground in Mosul. All the while, the U.S. military piously parrots its guff about how much they try to minimize civilian casualties.

Another way the U.S. shifts responsibility is using the Israeli line when the Israelis exterminate Palestinians civilians- their intended targets used the victims as “human shields.” Two points: if you know there are civilians in the way, and you kill them anyway, that's on YOUR head. Second: if you DON'T know civilians are there, then the “enemy” DIDN'T employ them as “shields.” To be “shields,” the enemy would have to announce it, make it obvious, conspicuously put the civilians in harm's way. Of course, in neither the case of the repeated Israeli assaults on Gaza (“mowing the lawn,” in the blood-chilling phrase the Israelis use among themselves to refer to these periodic “cleansings”) nor the U.S. case of bombing mosques and homes and whatever is it true that civilians were used in this way. The U.S. claims to be unaware of the presence of civilians in the targets it bombs.

And we know the U.S. has competent snipers it could use instead of aerial bombing- surely better-trained ones than those ISIS can deploy. The late racist killer Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper, boasted of killing hundreds of Iraqis. During the Vietnam War, Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese. One of the most chilling things I ever read was in a celebratory book describing how he exterminated a company of badly-led teenage soldiers in Vietnam. Horrible. Alvin York was a self-taught sharpshooter who killed 25 German soldiers in a single attack in World War I. By now, the U.S. military has refined sniping to an advanced science, enabling their killers to eliminate enemies from distances of over a mile away. They are also highly trained in created hidden positions from which to observe and snipe.

Meanwhile, in Syria, according to Gopal, Obama assiduously avoided bombing assets of the Assad regime. This in utter contradiction to his announced policy that "Assad must go," and alleged U.S. support for Syrian rebels. Obama's bombing concentrated on bombing jihadist groups. Trump's one-off attack on an Assad airbase following the sarin attack that killed children and adults was the first U.S. airstrike against the Assad regime. (Unfortunately it was largely ineffective as the base was operational within a day and more air attacks on the Syrian population followed.)

Cynical and immoral, the U.S. avoids yet another opportunity to use its force wisely in ways to help those they pretend they want to help.

1] “Trump Carrying Out Obama's Bombing Policies in Iraq, Sacrificing CiviliansTo Kill ISIS Snipers”-Videoclip here. From Democracy Now! 4/20/17 program. Democracy Now! airs a one-hour program Monday through Friday, the audio of which is broadcast on radio stations. The television show, with additional segments, is available free on their well-constructed website, democracynow.org, along with transcripts. It is a good source for information that the corporate oligarchic media (aka “the media”) either barely mentions or blacks out entirely. Also people who rarely or never get to speak in establishment media have a platform here. Unfortunately the politics of democracy now! Is rather muddled and naive. For example, since they adamantly oppose any use of U.S. military power ever, (this being “pro-peace,” apparently) their response to such things as ISIS atrocites, the murderousness of the Assad regime, etc., is limited to handwringing, bleating ineffectual “demands,” and calls for “a diplomatic solution,” apparently not realizing no such thing is possible with the likes of ISIS, Assad, etc.

Perhaps worse, they are also in effect accessories in major crimes of the Deep State by refusing to air the facts about them, such as the three major U.S. Domestic assassinations (the Kennedys and King- they never mention who killed King for example, despite frequent references to his assassination) and the nanothermite demolition of the three buildings at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

Still, the website/program is valuable for what it offers.

U.S. Torture To Come Roaring Back, As U.S. Continues Its Moral Degeneration. Obama Opened the Door.

Three of the top power positions of the U.S. Empire are being filled by men who are publicly and proudly pro-torture. First and foremost is the man at the very top, president-to-be Donald Trump, who during his campaign for the office promised to "bring back waterboarding and a lot worse." [1]

The designated Attorney General, head of the U.S. Department of "Justice," the racist and remorseless black vote suppressor Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, U.S. Senator from Alabama, is another public supporter of torture. Under his command will be a large part of the domestic repression apparatus of the U.S.: all U.S. prosecutors, the FBI secret police, the DEA drug and political police,  the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms police, the U.S. Marshals, and the Federal prisons- a total of about 114,000 personnel.

The man Trump picked to head the CIA, the U.S. global Gestapo, is Republican House Representative Mike Pompeo, a former U.S. Army tank officer, another torture-lover who for good measure has called on television for the execution of heroic, self-sacrificing whistleblower Edward Snowden. His new boss, Trump, also wants to use state power to murder Snowden. [2]

As the Republicans control the U.S. Senate, confirmation is pretty certain if not guaranteed for these vicious trolls. And Democrats are punks when it comes to fighting Republicans.

Looking at U.S. history, the arc of U.S. moral degeneration around torture comes clearly into view.
The U.S. has always tortured people, of course. Native American prisoners, slaves, and others of course were subjected to gruesome tortures. U.S. prisons have always been sites of torture, physical and psychological. Filipino insurgents were tortured during the invasion and subjugation of the Philippines around 1900.

The U.S. military and the CIA tortured countless thousands of Vietnamese during the invasion and occupation of Vietnam. We have a large body of evidence of military torture from the testimony of veterans.
And as part of Operation Phoenix, the CIA death squad program run by William Colby (later director of CIA), torture was routine, and at least 50,000 Vietnamese were murdered.

But officially torture was not acknowledged. Officially the U.S. didn't torture. An absurd lie, but in those days vice still felt the need to pay tribute to virtue in the form of hypocrisy.

Then came the regime of Bush the Younger (January 2001-January 2009), which pretty overtly systematized torture by the military and CIA, even issuing written directives and guidelines and instructions for carrying it out- while denying torture was torture. A phrase was cribbed from a Gestapo torture manual, "enhanced interrogation techniques," with the insistence that U.S. torture wasn't torture. To this day, the U.S. media rarely will call it by its right name, instead using the euphemism "harsh interrogation techniques." Perhaps they think this slight change proves their independence from state control.  The more daring among the commentariat and "journalists" once in awhile dart to the edge of the forbidden ideological zone and call it "brutal interrogation methods." Hint hint. (Oh, they are so brave!)

So torture became official policy, while it was denied that it was torture. (That's called having your cake and eating it too.) When photographic evidence of torture at the U.S.' Abu Ghraib political prison in Iraq surfaced, due to the carelessness and lack of sophistication of soldiers there who weren't schooled in secret-police deviousness but had the habit of thinking that whatever they did under orders was legitimate and no shame and didn't need to be treated as a deep dark secret, the Bush regime put on a burlesque act of shock and surprise and a handful of fall guy privates and a sergeant who had been a sadistic prison guard in civilian life had to be sacrificed to military courts martial.

Barack Hussein Obama paved the way for the coming torture holocaust of the Trump regime by refusing to enforce U.S. law and treaty obligations by prosecuting the Bush regime torturers. To be sure, this would have been politically difficult and would have involved a battle royale with the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) and the establishment media, but was absolutely necessary morally and politically. Of course, it would have been exceedingly naive to expect the political hustler and con man Obama to undertake such a necessary task. His only interest was in successfully climbing the greasy pole of U.S. establishment politics and sitting comfortably at its top, perched at the pinnacle of power. Like virtually all politicians of his party, power was his end, not a means to some other end, such as justice, or making the world better. (And don't believe their hype to the contrary.)

If you allow people to break laws with impunity, deterrence against law-breaking and evil-doing is destroyed.

With the precedent established that the executive branch could get away with more or less overt torture, there is no bar to the Trump regime's bringing torture back with a vengeance.

Law in the U.S. is merely a weapon to attack the weak, target victims, and feed the insatiable maw of the prison-industrial complex, whose roots trace back to Nixon (the slogan for this repression being "law and order") and was ramped up by the Clinton regime especially.

The other use of law is to have legal lackeys like John Yoo (for Bush) and his counterparts in the Obama regime concoct tortured legal rationales for criminal policies like torture (Bush) and assassinations (Obama). Obama added the extra wrinkle of treating the rationales themselves as state secrets, not to be revealed. A real Kafkaesque touch.

With the Bush regime having established the precedent that torture could be conducted openly with just a thin veil of mendacious nomenclature to provide a means of cynical denial, Trump and his minions now dispense with even the euphemisms.

Thus the U.S. has gone from hiding its torture by pretending it didn't exist, to pretending its torture wasn't torture by slapping a Nazi label on it, to dispensing with pretense entirely. A pattern of moral degeneracy.

It needs to be mentioned that torture didn't actually stop under Obama. Torture, psychological and physical, is a daily occurrence in U.S. jails and prisons. And the UN Rapporteur on Torture officially found that U.S. Army soldier Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning was subjected to conditions amounting to torture in the Marine brig at Quantico. (Manning's treatment was highly irregular- being kept in Marine, not Army custody, being kept naked, not being tried for two years, during which time his rights were grossly violated, and more.) Obama has shown a vindictive streak numerous times, against whistleblowers, journalists who reveal state secrets (crimes), people who heckle him (he had Egyptian secret police thugs break Medea Benjamin's arm in the Cairo airport), and murdering the teenage son and nephew of Anwar al-Awlaki.

Obama is slick and smooth, Trump bombastic and crude. But both are gangsters.

What a subtle hint, Donald! From Al-Jazeera interview with Edward Snowden 
and Daniel Ellsberg. View clip here.

1]  Torture "a lot worse" means more "detainees" sadistically tortured to death, like the Afghan taxi driver chained by his wrists hanging from a wall whose legs were pulped by a club-wielding "contractor," one of those fascist military veterans the U.S. produces. (The victim was he subject of the documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side," a reference to Bush regime vice president Dick Cheney's assertion thatthe U.S. would have to go to "the dark side" in its "war against terrorism."

2] Pompeo claimed Snowden put "friends of mine" "in enormous danger" and called for his execution. After "due process," that is- see how fair Pompeo is? Pompeo told two whopping lies in this brief segment. That Snowden "released" the NSA documents to foreign powers, and the "enormous danger" canard. Obviously NO U.S. troops (who Army veteran Pompeo was referring to) were put in ANY danger, and Snowden didn't "release" the documents at all. He gave them to journalists and ONLY to journalists, and didn't retain copies. The journalists in turn are deciding what information to release to the public.
 
Watch liar Pompeo.

In the Self-Proclaimed "World's Greatest Democracy," the Candidate With the Most Votes Just Lost

Democrat Hillary Clinton won more votes than Republican Donald Trump, but Trump won because of one of the U.S.' peculiar institutions, the "Electoral College." Presidents are actually elected by "electors," as per the U.S. Constitution. There are 538 of these electors, apparatchiks of the two ruling political parties. Clinton may end up with 2 million more votes than Trump after California is fully counted. (Clinton currently is ahead by 1 million.) But the so-called "popular vote" isn't what elects a U.S. president. The Electoral College vote does, and Trump won there, because he won enough of the 50 states to win a majority of the "Electors." [Later in this essay I explain the system in detail.]

This is the FIFTH U.S. presidential election in which the winner lost. It happened previously in 2000, 1888, 1876, and 1824. In fact, in 1824, the "winner," John Quincy Adams, didn't win the popular vote OR the Electoral College vote.

You would think the need to change this anti-democratic system would be obvious. Apparently it's not obvious to the elites who wield power.  The Democratic Party, having lost in 2000 and 2016, you'd think would be calling for change. But it isn't. Instead its two current leader, Obama and Clinton, immediately called for all citizens to fall in line behind Trump, to respect the "democratic process" and genuflect before the nobility of "our democracy." Obama immediately rushed to invite Trump to the White House and pledged to do his upmost to achieve a smooth transition of power and help Trump have a "successful" presidency.

Needless to say, their rivals, the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) doesn't return the favor. Trump repeatedly announced his intention to claim he was cheated if he lost the election. ("The system is rigged, Folks!" was one of his repeated lines in the weeks before November 8.) And when Obama was elected in 2008, the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, announced at the outset that his number one priority was to make sure Obama had a failed presidency. (The U.S. corporate media doesn't want anyone to remember these things, so they don't mention them.) Newt Gingrich, a smarmy opportunist who has attached himself like a barnacle to the Trump ship, practiced the same sort of "politics of destruction," trying to delegitimize the Democratic Party. But it goes back even further, to the post World War II GOP strategy of redbaiting Democrats, which is how Richard Nixon got elected to Congress and to the U.S. Senate, before Eisenhower elevated him to the vice presidency. Even earlier, in the 1930s, reactionary Republicans acted as ideological police against Democrats.

Those who genuinely oppose not just the racist, reactionary, deformed narcissist Trump and the horrible anti-human policies of the GOP, but those of the Democrats and this entire oppressive system cannot look to the Democratic Party to lead an opposition. The top Democrats have already announced their intention not to oppose Trump and the GOP agenda! (Harry Reid doesn't count as he is retiring.) They won't even block the arch-reactionaries Trump has vowed to elevate to the Supreme Court, even though the Republican Senators blocked Obama from filling the Antonin Scalia vacancy for almost a year. The Democrats in general knuckle under to every GOP power play. Plus, the Democrats are a corporate imperialist party that fundamentally opposes real changes in the U.S. system.

Why some people have a hard time seeing this is baffling. The history of the Democratic Party since the extreme racist Woodrow Wilson, who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act and the Palmer raids, makes it crystal clear that Democrats are no allies of true progressives. [In fact the Democratic Party was the party of white racism from the 19th century until the 1960s.]

I'm sure almost no non-Americans, and probably most Americans, don't understand the Electoral College. Therefore, here is an explanation.

The U.S. Constitution as originally written set up this crazy system, part of the conscious design to maintain elite class control over political power. In other words, the U.S. was created as a oligarchy, not a democracy. Originally only white male property owners could vote in the U.S.- not even all white men! Women could not vote until 1920, which means as of today they could vote during less than half of U.S. history, and Southern blacks not until the 1960s, with the exception of a few years immediately after the Civil War ended in 1865.

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution set up the Electoral College. The Xii Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1804, tweaked the College a bit. The Constitution calls for state legislatures to choose the Electors who in turn would vote for U.S. President and Vice President. But problems, such as deadlocked legislatures that couldn't decide on Electors, caused all the states except South Carolina to allow white men generally to vote for the Electors by 1832. South Carolina finally threw in the towel on state legislators having sole voting power for president in 1860, the same year that state became the first state to secede from the U.S., in December.

By the way, for 125 years state legislators picked their states' U.S. Senators, until 1913, when the XVII Amendment switched to "popular" election of U.S. Senators.

Today there are a total of 538 Electors. The Democratic Party and Republican Party choose the Electors. The American people are actually voting for these rival slates of Electors, unbeknownst to them.

These 538 party loyalists actually elect the president. Each state is apportioned a minimum of 3 electors. The number of electors per state corresponds to the number of a state's U.S. Congress people. As each state has two Senators and at least one Representative in the House, each has at least 3 electors. California, the most populous state and thus the state with the most House Representatives in the U.S. Congress, has 55 Electors. With 435 Representatives and 100 Senators (2 per state), that equals 535 Electors. The 3 remaining Electors were granted to the District of Columbia in 1964, 188 years after the United States was declared, when the residents of the capital city of the "World's Greatest Democracy" were finally allowed to vote.

The reason the "popular" vote and the Electoral College votes can differ is quite simple. All but two states gives 100% of their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote in the state. They don't have to do this, they could apportion the electoral votes according to the popular vote percentages, as this is entirely up to the individual states. But that is what they do. So say one candidate gets 55% in enough states to win a majority of electoral votes, but only 35%, say, in states he/she loses. They would have fewer "popular" votes nationwide, but a majority in the Electoral College.

The actual election by the Electoral College will occur this December, when the Electors meet in their respective state capitals and in the District of Columbia to vote. Not all of themn are legally bound to vote according to their state's popular vote, but since they are disciplined party hacks, they will. Trump is expected to receive 290 votes (270 required to win) and Clinton 228. The over 7 million votes that went to other candidates (including write-ins not on the ballots) get zero Electoral Votes, as if they don't exist. (The establishment media never mentions these votes, contributing to their invisibility.)

The U.S. territories Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands, get no votes from the Electoral College because they aren’t states and they don’t have a special Constitutional amendment to recognize them. 4.4 million U.S. citizens live in the territories, a population almost equal to the total of 6 states.  (There are 4.5 million combined in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and Delaware.)

Other people who can't vote are millions of people convicted of felonies in states that strip such people (mostly blacks) of the right to vote permanently.

If no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives votes for the next president, and the U.S. Senate for the vice-president. Which in practice would mean the controlling party in each chamber would pick its own party's candidate, barring some weird political deal. This happened just once, in 1824.

In the very first U.S. presidential election in 1789, there was only one candidate- George Washington. See how "democratic" the U.S. was even at the very beginning? I found an interesting article that describes how U.S. presidential politics has really been a battle between competing elites from the very start- and indeed is still today. [1] Rival gangs of rich people and corporate interests cluster around the two oligarchic parties and compete with each other for state power. They use demagoguery and dishonest propaganda slogans and
"ideas" to psychologically manipulate various sectors of the populace to vote for them.

Here is the breakdown of the "popular" vote and the prospective Electoral College tally. Notice that over 7 million voters who voted for someone other than the two candidates of the two-party dictatorship don't count at all, as they get zero Electoral College votes.

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php

Here is a useful historical timeline from Wikipedia.org ["Voting rights in the United States." Footnotes at Wikipedia.]

                                            Milestones of national franchise extension

Abolition of property qualifications for white men, from 1792 (Kentucky) to 1856 (North Carolina) — see: Jacksonian democracy.[5]

Citizenship in both the United States and U.S. States by birth or naturalization, 1868 — see: Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Non-white men, 1870 — see: Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Direct election of Senators, 1913 — see: Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution gave voters rather than state legislatures the right to elect senators.[11]

Women, 1920 — see: Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Native Americans (for all who did not already have the vote, which nearly two-thirds did[12]), 1924 — see: Indian Citizenship Act.[13]

Residents of Washington, D.C. for U.S. Presidential Elections, 1961 — see: Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Poll tax, 1964 — see: Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting imposition of poll tax in federal elections.

Protection of voter registration and voting for racial minorities, later applied to language minorities, 1965 — see Voting Rights Act of 1965; this has also been applied to correcting discriminatory election systems and districting.

Poll Tax, 1966 — see: Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), prohibiting imposition of poll tax or property requirements in all U.S. elections.

Adults between 18 and 21, 1971 — see: Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution,[14] were granted the vote in response to Vietnam War protests which argued that soldiers who were old enough to fight for their country should be granted the right to vote.[11]

Requirement that a person reside in a jurisdiction for an extended period — 14th Amendment; Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330  (1972).[15][16][16]

Washington, D.C., for restoring local elections such as Mayor and Councilmen, after a 100-year gap in Georgetown, and 190-year gap in the wider city, ending Congress's policy of local election disfranchisement started in 1801 in this former portion of Maryland, 1973, — see: D.C. Home rule.

United States Military and Uniformed Services, Merchant Marine, other citizens overseas, living on bases in the United States, abroad, or aboard ship, 1986 — see: Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.[17]
Finally, here's an interesting paragraph from the Federal Government's National Archives and Records Administration webpage on the Electoral College:

Reference sources indicate that over the past 200 years, over 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. There have been more proposals for Constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject. The American Bar Association has criticized the Electoral College as “archaic” and “ambiguous” and its polling showed 69 percent of lawyers favored abolishing it in 1987. But surveys of political scientists have supported continuation of the Electoral College. Public opinion polls have shown Americans favored abolishing it by majorities of 58 percent in 1967; 81 percent in 1968; and 75 percent in 1981.

Well, so much for democracy and the "will of the people."

For more details on the Electoral College, see the following:

"U.S. Electoral College: Frequently Asked Questions," National Archives and Records Administration.

"Electoral College, (United States)," Wikipedia.org.

"Breaking down the US elections: Your biggest questions answered," RT, November 8, 2016


1] "Presidential Elections," History.com, website of the History Channel cable TV channel. Oddly for a corporate entity, I've found the articles there mostly pretty objective.

Trump Adopts Obama Defense In Wake of Revelation of Crude Sexual Behavior and Attitude

"Anyone who knows me knows these words don't reflect who I am." -Donald "SuperEgo" Trump explaining why we should disregard his boasting about grabbing women by the "pussy," kissing women he doesn't even know, describing them as meat and himself acting like a beast of prey. [1]

"That's not who we are!" -Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, every time he has to explain away U.S. criminality or venality.

So, it doesn't matter if Americans torture people, assassinate people, bomb hospitals and journalists, imprison millions- since that's "Not who we are," it doesn't count as part of character and identity. Some doppelganger America did it. Perhaps an imposter America. Since America is really a Good Country, and Obama a Good Man, and Trump whatever he says he is, the actions to the contrary are not their responsibility. Thus the culprits dissociate themselves from their own crimes.

Hillary Clinton also trotted out the "That's not who we are" trope recently. Apparently this is now going to be an enduring part of U.S. propaganda and denial. [2]

Add that to Obama's Legacy.

1]  Trump and his supporters (including the loathsome Rudolph Giuliani making the rounds of the Sunday morning TV political propaganda show October 10, a man who openly carried on an affair while mayor and still married to another woman) have tried to play down the vulgar conversation between Trump and celebrity brownnoser Billy Bush, a member of the Bush clan and cousin of the most recent president Bush. Their spin is that it was a long time ago, and Trump apologized (grudgingly, reluctantly, and in a pro forma manner, while simultaneously attacking by saying Bill Clinton has said worse, and threatening to bring up at the next debate with Hillary Clinton the rape of Juanita Broaddrick and all the "bimbo eruptions"- to use the Clintons' campaign from 1992 when Bill's sexual affairs threatened his candidacy for President) and anyway he's not like that now.

But it wasn't just the words Trump used: Trump was describing his own habitual conduct. (The disgusting Billy Bush cackled gleefully at Trump's self-description, something there has been no comment on by "the" media. I guess those bastards cover each others' asses.)

Trump has a history of misogyny and stalking of women going back to his high school days. He has always felt entitled, being the son of a rich landlord. On the Bush tape, he says when you're a celebrity "you can do anything." Indeed, there are privileges reserved to some in this society. And in Trump's case, he didn't even have to be discreet! But now he discovers that when you run for a competitive political office, your life is put under scrutiny and your bad behavior no longer covered up for you.

CNN just dredged up radio clips spanning 23 years of Trump's banter with the vulgar Howard Stern. Remember, this stuff was broadcast over public airwaves, with nary a ding to Trump's reputation until now. Here are a few gems:

Trump said he would “have no problem” having sex with 24-year-olds, and he “couldn’t care less” if he satisfies the women he sleeps with. But they have to be young, since “it’s checkout time” once women reach age 35. He also boasted that he'd engaged in three-way sex. “Haven’t we all?” Trump told Stern on his SiriusXM satellite radio show in 2008, obviously aware that "we all" haven't. Notice the ploy to assert his own superiority and make others feel inferior.

Someone might want to think twice about working for Trump enterprise. When he owned the Miss Universe pageant, he would barge in on nude contestants in their dressing room, calling it an "inspection."

With his connoisseur's eye, Trump pronounced of his daughter Ivanka, “She’s actually always been very voluptuous,”

Here's Trump's definition of "the perfect date:"

“You meet at 7 for drinks. You promise to take her to dinner, but you never get there.”

That's my definition of a lout.

2]  Far more substantive than Trump's sexism and misogyny is the expose of what Clinton said to all those finance capitalists in the speeches they so richly paid her for. It was the opposite of what she claims to stand for in her public pronouncements during this campaign. (No surprise, really.) Thanks to Russia and WikiLeaks for that. But "the" media is making a much bigger deal out of the Trump scandal du jour, since the establishment consensus is that Trump Must Not Be President. Why, he won't even demonize Official Enemy Vladimir Putin!

For the Trump recordings, see below.

Trump and Billy Bush discuss how to relate to women: "Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005," Washington Post, October 8, 2016.

For Trump and Howard Stern: "Donald Trump to Howard Stern: It's okay to call my daughter a 'piece of ass'," CNN Politics, October 9, 2016.

I just gave the GREATEST APOLOGY you ever, heard. It was truly amazing. No one has ever been as contrite as I was. Trust Me on this.

Pretty women are like magnets. I just have to kiss them, okay?

The Last Time the FARC Disarmed, Thousands of its Members Were Slaughtered. Is That About To Happen Again?

Sometimes history doesn't repeat as farce, but as yet another tragedy. Of course, one person's tragedy can be another's cause for celebration. (The Nazis and the Jews- and hopefully now most of the rest of humanity- had very different feelings about the Holocaust, for example.)

You wouldn't know it from establishment media "reporting," but the just-announced ceasefire between the Colombian rulers ("government") and the rebel force FARC, under which FARC will disarm and become a political party and presumably participate in elections, is the second time we've been here.

The same agreement was made back in 1984, the so-called La Uribe Agreement, FARC disarmed and came out into the open. The following year, FARC got together with various leftist and communist groups to create a  new political party, the Union Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP). The UP sought terribly evil political reforms, such as a revised constitution, democratic local elections, political decentralization, and most unforgivably, an end to the hegemony over Colombian politics by the Liberal and Conservative parties. They called for desperately needed health and education spending, favored nationalization of foreign businesses, Colombian banks, and transportation, and public access to the oligarchy's media. They even had the effrontery to pursue land redistribution! (Hundreds of thousands of rural families were rendered landless by people like Alvaro Uribe, father of the fascist death squads and the previous president of Colombia before the current one.)

Needless to say, all this was unacceptable, so the rulers unleashed their death squads, which dutifully murdered not just one, but two UP presidential candidates, numerous UP public office-holders and officials, and as many as 6,000 people all told between 1986 and 1990. In 1989 a single landholder had over 400 UP members murdered. (Notice that rich Colombians all have an individual license to kill.) And in 1990, every single presidential candidate from all the center-left parties were assassinated. Apparently merely stealing an election is too humdrum for the Colombian "elite." (Most of the UP ranks were not from FARC, but from socialist and labor groups.)

Will this time be any different? Given the bloodthirsty history of the Colombian ruling class and its military and auxiliary fascist death squads (euphemistically referred to in Western media as "right-wing paramilitaries," when they're mentioned at all), there is reason for grave concern. This new Colombian ceasefire may well  be a prelude to yet another ruling class extermination campaign against its class enemies.

You would think this very germane antecedent would bear at least a mention, but no. This part of history conflicts with the propaganda narrative of Western media, so it is simply ignored completely, as if it never happened. [1]

Instead, we are now being fed false and grossly misleading propaganda like this from the U.S. Government's NPR, and the British Government's BBC (every half hour around the clock from the BBC): "historic ceasefire," as if it's a first; the ceasefire is "to put an end to five decades of war..." (if you don't count the years 1984-1990- although I guess in a sense most of those years was a war, if a one-sided one, like the "war on drugs," or the Nazi "war against the Jews) "...and turn them [FARC] into a legal political movement;" FARC will become a party and "will try to gain political power in Colombia through democratic means," as if they never tried that before. As if the problem is violent leftists who don't believe in democracy, not a ruling class that doesn't allow the vast majority of people to participate except to rubber-stamp two ruling class parties!

And the same aforementioned propaganda outfits keep telling us that 220,000 or 260,000 people were "killed in the conflict." That neatly sidesteps the fact that the vast majority of those killed were unarmed civilians slaughtered by the government's military and the rulers' death squads. It also avoids mentioning the mass grave found outside at least one army base, of local civilians murdered for bounties. The government had the brilliant idea of paying bonuses for dead "guerrillas." So grab a poor peasant and murder him- easy money!

The BBC put on an American polemicist and unreconstructed imperialist named Steven Pinker, a hustler originally from Canada who now bills himself as a "cognitive scientist" and wrangled a perch for himself in the psychology department of Harvard University, a school that is sort of a Ground Zero for U.S. imperialist ideology. Pinker instructed that the Colombian civil war (bourgeois media never call it a civil war) "is the last remnant of the Cold War," which can only mean that FARC was a cat's paw of the Soviet Union, part of the "International Communist Conspiracy," the alibi U.S. imperialists long used to justify their coups, invasions, and imposition of fascistic military dictatorships and various repressive regimes designed to quash democracy and social progress in its sphere of influence- a sphere which they believe ultimately should rightly include the entire planet, the dream of every imperialist who ever lived.

Ask yourself this: in the quarter century since the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, has U.S. behavior changed one bit? To the contrary, NATO, which was created, it was claimed, to defend against a Soviet invasion of western Europe, has since been expanded right up to Russia's borders, and assigned new missions helping fight the U.S.'s wars in far-flung lands. The U.S. is still aiding and abetting coups against democratically-elected governments, as in Honduras, Egypt, Venezuela, and Brazil. It is committed to a relentless expansion of its power. Through the NSA, it attempts to spy on all communications everywhere. It has put in train a trillion dollar buildup of nuclear weapons.

And what about the period before the Soviet Union came into existence in 1917? Over a century earlier, the U.S. invaded British Canada to try and annex those lands for itself. In 1846 it attacked Mexico, ultimately forcing Mexico to cede over half (55%) of its entire national territory to the U.S. (including Texas), with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In 1998 it started a war with the decrepit Spanish empire to seize Spain's colonies, even the Philippines, on theother side of the globe. (The Filipinos had the crazy notion that they were entitled to self-determination and independence, so the U.S. had to beat that notion out of them with the usual methods of torture and mass killing.) The U.S. invaded various Caribbean and Central American nations numerous times in the first decades of the twentieth century. And so on.

Cold War my eye.

Steven Pinker. Even a clown can spout imperialist propaganda.

Let's briefly review how FARC came into existence in the first place. It's not some inexplicable derangement of innately evil people.

In 1948, the ruling classes inaugurated a decade of mass murder with the assassination of popular politician  Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Over the next ten years, a period called La Violencia, (The Violence,), over 300,000 people were murdered, overwhelmingly peasants and poor laborers. Then in 1958, the bourgeois elites of the "Liberal" and "Conservative" Parties, in cahoots with the ever-reactionary Catholic Church and big businessmen, set up a two-party dictatorship they christened the National Front. The two parties would take turns ruling, irrespective of actual election results. "Radical" were frozen out of political life. This oligarchic arrangement, a political monopoly of the upper classes enforced by state repression and violence, lasted until 1990.

In 1959, the U.S. sent a crew of its state terrorists ("counterinsurgency experts") down to Colombia to assess the situation and craft a state terror campaign to crush any reaction to the slaughter of the preceding decade.. The U.S. Army "Special Forces" (aka Green Berets) recommended that  "in order to shield the interests of both Colombian and US authorities against 'interventionist' charges any special aid given for internal security was to be sterile and covert in nature," which beneath the jargon is quite sinister. Then in 1962 another "Special Warfare" [i.e. state terrorism] team from Fort Bragg  paid a return visit, led by the Special Warfare Center commander himself, one General William P. Yarborough. He recommended to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (notice the high level this conspiracy is operating on) the formation of a "paramilitary" force to carry out sabotage and terrorism against "communists." This plan was duly implemented. The criminal conspiracy was dubbed Plan Lazo.

Under this plot, the U.S. goaded the Colombian government to attack villages that tried to arm themselves for self-defense. In one such operation, 16,000 Colombian troops, backed by U.S. might, attacked the village of Marquetalia, a community of 1,000 souls, 48 of whom were armed. These armed men managed to escape, and led by Manuel Marulanda Vélez, one of their number, founded FARC, which grew from that beginning.

If Colombia had ever been a democracy, if the rulers of Colombia weren't murderous thugs, if they didn't systematically assassinate popular leaders and slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, would the FARC even exist in the first place? No.

The propaganda systems of "Western" nations like to paint FARC as evil and the source of all violence in Colombia. This is a grotesque distortion of the actual history of Colombia, which makes clear that FARC was formed in response to the hyper-violence of the "upper" classes in Colombia against the "lower" classes. Members of the victim classes in fact were forced to take up arms.

Western propagandists also enjoy portraying FARC as a gang of degenerate kidnappers and drug lords. What's rarely mentioned is that they aren't the only ones using drugs as a source of funds. The corrupt Colombian government has plenty of officials involved in protecting the drug trade. The "paramilitaries" partake of cocaine money. And the CIA has profited from drug trafficking almost from its inception. So the high moral dudgeon of Western media rings a tad hollow to an objective person's ear.

The FARC was basically forced into accepting the current dangerous deal, even though it may well be walking into the same deadly trap as it was lured into in 1984, again, thanks to the U.S. Because of massive U.S. military and "intelligence" aid to the Colombian regime, FARC has been crippled and diminished. Under two Democratic Party presidents, Bill "Golden Tongue" Clinton and Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, sinister U.S. operatives from the CIA and military, and large amounts of weapons, were sent in to fight on the side of the regime against the rebellious sectors of its populace. Under Obama, FARC leaders were located and then assassinated. FARC was strategically trapped in a downward spiral of the U.S.' design. So now tell me again, all you "progressive" fellow-travelers, why we should vote for the Democrats!

So under Obama, U.S. "policy" in Latin America has consisted of: a coup attempt in Venezuela, then the probable murder of Hugo Chavez by the CIA; a coup in Honduras; imprisoning women and children fleeing U.S.-created violent hellholes in Central America; approval of a coup by corrupt legislators in Brazil; and a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign in Colombia that has killed thousands. Oh, but he reestablished relations with Cuba, the better to subvert the established order there. (Cuba does need changes, by the way. Say, that "naval base" in Guantanamo Bay, you ever gonna get the hell out of there, U.S.?)

None dare call them imperialists!

The very respectable Alvaro Uribe, Godfather of Death Squads, President of Colombia 2002-2010

1]  I've only ever come across one mention of the 1985-90 extermination campaign in the establishment's media that I can remember. It was buried about two-thirds of the way down in a lengthy New York Times article, consisting of a short paragraph or two, very matter-of-fact, and then the article returned to FARC-demonization, as all NY Times articles dealing with FARC do. So is it not correct to call the NY Times imperialist propaganda? That's not a polemical statement, it's a factual one.

"History of FARC," Wikipedia, August 29, 2016.