Memo To Trump Impeachment Pushers: Be Careful What You Wish For

Who do you imagine will succeed "The Donald" if you succeed?

Mike Pence, the religious fanatic and extreme reactionary, becomes president.

Pence's domestic policies will be every bit as bad, and probably worse in some areas (such as the war against abortion rights) than Trump's.

On foreign policy, at least Trump is internally divided. He has "isolationist" (noninterventionist) impulses, so part of the time you get that, while at other times you get a violent lashing out, as the attack on the Assad regime airfield in Syria after the sarin attack by that regime- my only complaint about that Trump attack is that it was ineffectual. Plus, Trump isn't particularly interested in foreign policy. Therefore U.S. imperialism under Trump would probably be less focuses, less intense, and less assiduously imposed everywhere possible at all times than is the norm. Which is a MAJOR REASON the power establishment (political, media, and Deep State, which includes the military and secret police organizations) is so intent on hamstringing or, if possible, ousting Trump.

Pence can be expected to be much like Reagan and the Bushes on foreign policy; aggressively violent, employing the military and CIA very extensively.

Even worse, is that Pence projects a low-key, non-threatening, friendly and placid demeanor. In a word, he comes across as amiable. Thus he will be the more effective evil. Just as Obama was the more effective evil than Bush II, or than McCain or Romney would have been. Simply put, the "nice guy" personas of state criminals like Obama and Pence simply don't arouse the public opposition that Republicans generally and especially politicians who come across as intense do.

So Trump is a horror, but Pence would be worse.

By the way, Obama was a horror, Bush the Younger was a horror, Clinton was a horror, Bush the Elder was a horror, Reagan the fascist was a horror, Ford helped Indonesia invade East Timor and exterminate a third of the population (with Kissinger at his side, a policy continued by Clinton), Nixon (enough said), Johnson sent a 550,000 invasion force into Vietnam, and invaded the Dominican Republic to reverse an election he didn't like, and arranged for military dictatorship in Brazil, a U.S. plot begun by Kennedy, who created a U.S. torturer-training program in Latin America under the rubric of the "Alliance for Progress," and Eisenhower was responsible for the CIA coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) which ushered in two of the world's most murderous dictatorship, a quarter million people murdered in each case, and the consequences still being suffered by the peoples of those countries to this day. Truman, the man who atomic-bombed two cities, enough said- and I could go back and back, indeed all the way to Washington, but there are too many, and the crimes are literally in the tens of thousands. because imperialism is a criminal enterprise, and  the U.S. was imperialist from the beginning, when white colonizers "discovered" the Western Hemisphere, and  eliminated in North American over 90% of the people whose ancestors predated the Europeans' arrival by 15,000 years, in order to seize the land and resources.

The point is, Trump is not uniquely bad. That's the establishment line, because he's unpredictable and not anchored to their ideology. That means there are possibilities for cracks in the system to open. That is one reason people instinctively voted for him- on the hope he would "shake things up." Of course he won't deliver on his promises, but he IS a destabilizing presence in the White House. If nothing else, the attention of the criminal rulers is somewhat diverted by their obsession with demonizing, "investigating," undermining, neutralizing, and ultimately ousting him. That gives the world's population a bit of breathing space, or a lessening in the intensity of U.S. attacks (including perhaps domestic dissidents, with the FBI and CIA and NSA prioritizing their conspiracies against Trump).

The U.S. is a nation founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery, which has, with the immense power it has amassed, a world-historic opportunity to change the nature of civilization, but instead is simply repeating the same millenia-old game of domination, exploitation, and oppression. (By the way, committing genocide has been a very good way to get to the White House. For example, Andrew Jackson, exterminator of the Creek Indians, got to be President, as did William Henry Harrison, who destroyed the Confederacy of Northwest Tribes and oversaw the elimination of the charismatic native leader Tecumseh.)


In America now, we see a colossal waste of power and the squandering of a world-historic opportunity to change the world for the better.  And what a lack of ambition this bespeaks. The ambition to do something truly great and world-changing. With its unparalleled power, the U.S. could put humanity on a truly civilized path. Instead Americans prefer to delude themselves that their nation-state (and by extension, themselves) are "great" simply because they are powerful. But since the power is largely (not entirely) used for evil, their "greatness" is of a piece with the "greatness" of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. It may be awesome, but it is not admirable. It is anti-human, as we see even today, yet again, with President Trump and his Secretary of State, Rex "Gusher" Tillerson, praising the Saudi oppressors, among the very worst in the world, while simultaneously, with the maximal hypocrisy typical of the U.S. government, slamming Iran for its repression and "terrorism." (Trump and his gang talk as if IRAN is behind ISIS and Al-Qaeda, not Saudi Arabia!)

The blather and bullshit sure gets repetitive after awhile.

Too bad so many of the fellow travelers of the Democratic Party, who should know better, are mindlessly parroting the propaganda lines of that Party and its secret police temporary allies-of-convenience. (Rather stunning to hear Democracy Now boss Amy Goodman repeatedly saying the phrase "Russian meddling" in the U.S. election!)

Maybe putting things in historical and political perspective would help them think more clearly. No need to take sides in a battle between Godzilla and Mothra.  (Trump and his establishment enemies.) The proper response is to illuminate what is happening, including the real causes of the conflict, to report objectively and demystify the show that is being presented in the Bourgeois Media Theater.

Typical victims of U.S. "Defense of Freedom"

American Heroes with captive Woman

 

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.