Jun 24

Today’s News 24th June 2018

  • Atrocity Porn And Hitler Memes Target Trump For Regime Change

    Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    American and global audiences have been bombarded with media images of wailing children in holding facilities, having been separated from adults (maybe their parents, maybe not) detained for illegal entry into the United States. The images have been accompanied by “gut-wrenching” audio of distraught toddlers screaming the Spanish equivalents of “Mommy!” and “Daddy!” – since, as any parent knows, small children never cry or call for their parents except in the most horrifying, life-threatening circumstances.

    American and world media have provided helpful color commentary, condemning the caging of children as openly racist atrocities and state terrorism comparable to Nazi concentration camps and worse than FDR’s internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Indeed, just having voted for Trump is now reason enough for Americans to be labeled as Nazis.

    Finally, the presumptive Hitler himself, also known as President Donald Trump, citing the pleas of First Lady Melania and First Daughter Ivanka, signed an Executive Order to provide for adults and (their?) children to be detained together. However, the order is unlikely to hold up in court, with sanctuary-minded states aiming to obstruct border enforcement the way Trump’s earlier order on vetting arrivals from terrorism-prone countries has been crippled by the federal judiciary. His media and bipartisan political opposition will be happy only when all border violation detentions cease and America has gone full Merkel, starting with ending Trump’s declared zero tolerance for illegal crossings and restoration of Barack Obama’s catch-and-release policy.

    Even then, Trump will be vilified for taking so long to do it. Whether or how Trump may yield further is not clear, but rather than slaking the hate campaign against him, his attempted effort at appeasement has put the smell of political blood in the water with the November 2018 Congressional midterm elections looming.

    Some images of small children have become veritable icons of Trumpian brutality. One photo, reportedly of a two-year-old Honduran girl (who in fact had not been separated from her mother), graced the cover of Time magazine, confronting the black-hearted tyrant himself. Another, of a little boy in a cage, went viral before it was revealed that this kid had nothing to do with the border but rather was briefly inside a staged pen as part of a protest in Dallas.

    The reality behind the pictures doesn’t matter, though. More important are the images themselves and their power, along with dishonest media spin, to produce an emotional response that short-circuits critical thinking.

    Never mind what the facts are! Children are suffering! Trump is guilty! We need to “do something”!

    On point of comparison, let’s remember the  saturation media distribution given in 2016 to a picture of a little boy, Omran Daqneesh, said to have been pulled from the rubble of Aleppo after what was dubiously reported as a Russian airstrike. Promptly dubbed “Aleppo Boy,” his pathetic dusty image immediately went viral in every prestige outlet in the United States and Europe. The underlying message: we – the “international community,” “the Free World,” the United States, you and I – must “do something” to stop Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his main backer and fellow Hitler clone Vladimir Putin.

    (Not long before, another little boy, also in the area of Aleppo, was beheaded on video by the “moderate” US-supported jihad terror group Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki. The images of his grisly demise received far less media attention than those of official Aleppo Boy. This other youngster received no catchy moniker. No one called for anyone in power to “do something.” In fact, western support for the al-Zenki murderers – which the Obama administration refused to disavow even after the beheading and allegations of chlorine gas use by al-Zenki – can itself be seen as part of “doing something” about the evil, evil Assad. (Reportedly Trump’s viewing the beheading video led to a cutoff of CIA aid to some jihad groups.) Another small detail readily available in alternative media but almost invisible in the major outlets: Mahmoud Raslan, the photographer who took the picture of Aleppo Boy and disseminated it to world acclaim, also took a smiling selfie with the beaming al-Zenki beheaders of the other kid. But, hey, says Raslan, I barely know those guys. Now let’s move on . . . )

    For those who have been paying attention for the past couple of decades, the Trump border crisis kids, like Aleppo Boy before them, are human props in what is known as ‘atrocity porn‘ designed to titillate the viewers through horror and incite them to hatred of the presumed perpetrators. Atrocity propaganda has long been a part of warfare – think World War I claims of Belgian babies impaled on German bayonets – but with modern digital technology and social media the impact is immediate and universal.

    It’s irrelevant whether what is identified in images corresponds to reality. What matters is their ability to evoke mindless, maudlin emotionalism, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow choking up in tears over the border children or the similar weepy display in 2016 by CNN’s Kate Bolduan over Aleppo Boy.  

    Now being deployed in an American domestic context over whether or not the US should be allowed to control its borders, for decades atrocity porn has been essential for selling military action in wars of choice unconnected to the actual defense of the US: incubator babies (Kuwait/Iraq); the Racak massacre (Kosovo); the Markale marketplace bombings, Omarska “living skeletons,” and the Srebrenica massacre (Bosnia); rape as calculated instrument of war (Bosnia, Libya); and false flag poison gas attacks in Ghouta  and Douma (Syria). Never mind that the facts, to the extent they eventually become known, may later turn out to be very different from the categorical black-and-white accusations on the lips of western officials and given banner exposure within hours if not minutes of the event in question.

    Atrocity porn dovetails closely with another key meme, that of Hitler-of-the-month. In painting Trump as der Führer on the border, we see coming home to America a ploy that has been an essential element to justify foreign regime change operation, each of which has been spelled out in terms of black-and-white, good-versus-evil Manichaean imperatives, with the side targeted for destruction or replacement having absolutely no redeeming qualities. This entails first of all absolute demonization of the evil leader in what is called reductio ad Hitlerum, a concept attributed to philosopher Leo Strauss in 1951. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been characterized by name as another Hitler by Hillary Clinton and others. Among the prominent “Hitlers” since 1991 have been Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia/Serbia), Radovan Karadzic (Republika Srpska), Moammar Qaddafi (Libya), and Bashar al-Assad (Syria), with less imposing Führer figures to be found in Mohamed Farrah Aidid (Somalia), Manuel Noriega (Panama), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran), and Omar al-Bashir (Sudan).

    With apologies to Voltaire, if Hitler had not existed it would be necessary for the US-UK Deep State to invent him . . .

    Today the atrocity porn and Hitler memes that have been so useful in justifying regime change in other countries are being directed with increasing intensity against America’s own duly elected president. This is at a time when the original conspiracy to discredit and unseat him, the phony “Russian collusion” story, is in the process of unraveling and being turned back on its originators. Horror of horrors, Trump is now feeling free enough to move forward on a meeting with Putin.

    Keep in mind that Putin is, according to Hillary Clinton, leader of the worldwide “authoritarian, white-supremacist, and xenophobic movement” who is “emboldening right-wing nationalists, separatists, racists, and even neo-Nazis.” So he and Hitler-Trump should get on famously! The prospect of any warming of ties between Washington and Moscow has elements of the US intelligence agencies, together with their British coconspirators in MI6 and GCHQ, in an absolute panic.

    That’s why desperate measures are in order. As noted earlier, when confronted with a reincarnation of the most evil personage in history, even the most extreme actions cannot be ruled out. Demonizing the intended target neutralizes objections to his removal – by any means necessary.

    After all, how can any decent person oppose getting rid of Hitler?

  • Bill Maher Defends "Wish" For "A Recession" That Will "Erode Trump's Popularity"

    Bill Maher, the host of HBO’s long-running late night talk show “Real Time”, took a few minutes out of his show Friday night to respond to the backlash to a segment from last week’s show where he voiced his hope that the US economy takes a nosedive into recession in the relatively near future, because – as Maher argued – a recession is the only thing that will help get rid of Trump by “eroding his popularity.”

    Maher started the segment by repeating his now infamous line: “A recession is a survivable event. What Trump is doing to this country…is not” before lobbing a few criticisms of his own at the “right-wing nut-o-sphere” that took umbrage with his remarks. Responding to Laura Ingraham’s claim that Maher has been rooting for an “economic collapse”, Maher called her claims “laughable”, arguing that he never said anything about wishing for an “economic collapse.” “All I did was make a wish!,” Maher joked. Anybody who doesn’t understand this, he said, could use a “course in perspective.”

    “And finally, new rule, anyone who went apeshit over the last two weeks because I said going through a recession would be worth it if it undermined Trump’s popularity has to enroll in college and take a course in perspective,” Maher told his audience.

    Maher believes his economic commentary is important, given that the American left is seemingly fixated on children being separated from their parents at the border, gun control and “intersectional” issues like transgender Americans’ rights to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, while ignoring the fact that Democracy in America is “going the way of the DoDo bird”..

    “Democracy is about to go the way of the dinosaurs because we’ve been taken over by a dodo bird,” he added, to laughs. “So let me repeat: Recessions are survivable events. We survive one every time a Republican is in the White House. It’s true. Every Republican president since Teddy Roosevelt has presided over a recession.”

    But criticisms of Maher’s comments weren’t exclusively made by the right: Dean Obeidallah, a CNN contributor, wrote that “Bill Maher is wrong to root for a recession – and it hurts progressives that a so called progressive like millionaire Bill Maher is rooting for Americans to suffer.” And while Maher scoffed at the notion that Alex Jones’ accused him of being worth $100 million, he does collect an annual salary of $10 million. The controversy began when Maher suggested during his show last week that only an economic recession would be enough to dislodge Trump from office – and that an economic downturn would be well-worth it to spare Americans from Trump’s policies like his tax reform bill which handed money back to corporations and the wealthy (ignoring the fact that many working Americans – particularly those living in states that voted for Trump – have also benefited).

    “I feel like the bottom has to fall out at some point,” Maher said.

    Of course, Maher is right about one thing: The US economy has survived, on average, one recession every ten years. And with  the current business cycle – already the second-longest on record for the US – drawing inevitably closer to its end, the odds that Trump ends up presiding over a recession are increasing with each passing day.

    Expansion

  • Johnstone: "Anyone Promoting Regime Change In Iran Is An Evil Piece Of Shit"

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    I have been saying all year that the 8chan phenomenon known as “QAnon” is bogus, and as time has gone on the evidence has become overwhelming that it is an establishment psyop designed to herd the populist right into accepting the narratives and agendas of the establishment orthodoxy. Whether they’re claiming that every capitulation the Trump administration makes to longstanding neoconservative agendas is actually brilliant 4-D chess strategy, or saying that Julian Assange isn’t really trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, QAnon enthusiasts are constantly regurgitating talking points which just so happen to fit in very conveniently with the interests of America’s defense and intelligence agencies.

    A recent “Q drop” (a fancy name for an anonymous user posting text onto a popular internet troll message board with zero accountability) makes this more abundantly clear than ever, with text reading as follows:

    Free Iran!!!
    Fight
    Fight
    Fight
    Regime change.
    People have the power.
    We stand with you.
    Q

    Once you’re cheering for a longtime neoconservative agenda to be accomplished in one of George W Bush’s “Axis of Evil” countries, you are cheering for the establishment. Or, to put it more clearly to Q followers, you are cheering for the deep state.

    So now you have conspiracy-minded populist right wingers being manipulated into supporting the same standard Bush administration globalist agendas that Alex Jones built his career on attacking. The support for regime change interventionism in Iran isn’t limited to the QAnon crowd, having now gone fully mainstream throughout Trump’s base, and I’d like to address a few of the arguments here that they have been bringing to me:

    “Iran is nowhere near the same thing as Iraq, Libya or Syria!”

    Please go look at a globe and think a little harder about your position here. Iran is a target for regime change for the exact same reasons its neighbors Iraq and Syria have been; it occupies and extremely strategically significant location in an oil-rich region that the US-centralized empire wants full control of. Thinking this one is different because its government isn’t secular is the product of many years of Islamophobic propaganda; the plutocrats and their allied intelligence and defense agencies don’t care what religion sits on top of their oil, and Saudi Arabia proves it. Any argument made against Iranian theocracy could be made even more strongly against KSA theocracy, but you don’t see Sean Hannity advocating the overthrow of the Saudi royals, do you?

    “But this regime change intervention would be completely different!”

    No it wouldn’t. There has never been a US-led regime change intervention in the Middle East that wasn’t disastrous. Cheering for regime change interventionism in Iran is cheering for all the destabilization, chaos, terror, death, rape and slavery that always necessarily comes with such interventions. Wanting to inflict that upon the world is monstrous.

    “This is different, though! This one is led by Trump! Look at all that he’s accomplished in North Korea!”

    Okay, three things:

    1. All that Trump has done with North Korea is take the very first step in the most rudimentary beginnings of peace talks. I fully support him in taking that step, but you can’t legitimately treat it as an “accomplishment” which proves that he is a strategic genius capable of facilitating the impossible task of non-disastrous regime change in Iran.

    2. Even if Trump does help bring abiding peace to the Korean Peninsula, it won’t legitimize regime change interventionism in Iran. Hell, even if Trump gets North Korea to denuclearize (and he won’t), it still wouldn’t legitimize regime change interventionism in Iran. US-led regime change interventionism is always disastrous, especially in the easily destabilized geopolitical region of the Middle East.

    3. Neocons are always wrong about foreign policy. Always. There’s no reason to believe Trump spearheading a longstanding neocon agenda would work out any better than Bush or any other neocon.

    “Well what about the Iranians in Iran who want regime change?”

    What about them? The fact that some Iranians want their government changed has nothing to do with you or your government. The Fox News and Washington Post pundits who keep pointing out the fact that Iran, like America, contains people who are unhappy with its current system of government are only ever trying to galvanize the west against Tehran. There’s no good reason for you to be acting as a pro bono CIA propagandist running around telling westerners how great it would be if the Mullahs were gone.

    “Well I don’t want the US to intervene, I just want the Iranians to free themselves!”

    Two things:

    1. This administration is already currently engaged in regime change interventionism in Iran in the form of escalated CIA covert operations and harsh economic sanctions, and its involvement with Iranian terror cult MEKsuggests it may run far deeper than that in a similar way to US involvement with extremist groups in Syria, Libya and Ukraine.

    2. Why say anything, then? Ever stop to ask yourself why you’re always cheering for Iranians to overthrow their government? Why constantly cheerlead for something which requires zero western involvement? Whom does that help? Do you think Iranians don’t already know that America hates their government?

    All you’re doing is helping to signal boost the pro-regime change propaganda that US defense and intelligence agencies have been seeding into American public consciousness for many years. Your “Yay, free Iran!” sentiments aren’t helping Iranians, they’re helping the western propagandists target western audiences. You’re just helping the public get more okay with any actions taken against the Iranian government, in exactly the same way Russiagaters help manufacture support for escalations against Russia.

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    Come on, people. Think harder. This one isn’t difficult. It’s not a random coincidence that you’re all being paced into supporting regime change in the final target named seventeen years ago in General Wesley Clark’s famous “seven countries in five years” list of neocon regime change agendas. The only thing that has changed is the face on the agenda.

    Iran is not different from the other regime change targets of Iraq, Libya or Syria. Barack Obama served George W Bush’s third and fourth terms, and Donald Trump is serving his fifth. They were strong-armed in different ways by America’s unelected power establishment into advancing different regime change agendas depending on where their political support came from and public sentiment at the time, but it’s all been pointed at the exact same region for the exact same reasons.

    Leave Iran alone. Leave the Iranian people alone. There is no legitimate reason for you to be cheering for regime change in Iran, and anyone who tells you otherwise is an evil piece of shit. Reject them.

    *  *  *

    Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

  • TV Blackout For Erdogan Opposition As Turkey Vote Looms; Goldman On What To Expect Tomorrow

    Presidential and parliamentary elections will be held concurrently in Turkey on Sunday, with the results likely to start emerging on Sunday evening. In the presidential election, opinion polls suggest that President Erdogan is likely to fall just short of the 50% required to win in the first round (implying a second round run-off on July 8). In the parliamentary elections, opinion polls also point to a close result, with a high probability that the incumbent AKP-led Cumhur Alliance could lose its majority.

    While victory is likely for Erdogan (as we detailed here), Erdogan is utilizing all his state powers to ensure his own success.

    AKP President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Republican People’s Party (CHP) challenger Muharrem Ince.  Image via Hurriyet

    Bloomberg reports “State TV TRT gives no air time to opposition’s Istanbul rally” while multiple sources confirm a television blackout for the Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Muharrem Ince as Erdogan’s rival continues to reportedly draw immense crowds. 

    Screenshot of CHP candidate Muharrem Ince Saturday rally on the Asian side of Istanbul. 

    Both are in Istanbul a day ahead of Sunday’s vote widely considered the most important in recent Turkish political history — a crossing the Rubicon moment for Erdogan as he stands to inherit an unprecedented and likely irreversible level of sweeping executive authority. 

    We noted previously that Muharrem Ince’s political rallies in major cities this week have drawn shockingly large crowds, a worrisome sign for incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who called for Sunday’s snap election at a time when the economy was stronger and as he likely felt unbeatable. 

    But multiple international outlets are noting that while Erdogan is still favored to win, a noticeable surge in popular discontent at runaway inflation and a tanking economy, as well as the conservative AKP party leader’s enabling of nepotism and corruption on a mass scale, is bringing a cross-section of Turks to the streets in support of secularist CHP contender Ince. 

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    For example, Ince’s Wednesday rally in Izmir included a crowd size estimating in range from 300,000 up to several million, depending on the media source commenting.

    Bloomberg describes the scene in Istanbul on Saturday:

    President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s biggest rival appealed to a massive rally in Istanbul in the campaign’s final hours. You just wouldn’t know it watching state television.

    Muharrem Ince, a 54-year-ld former physics teacher, addressed what his CHP party claimed was a crowd of 4 million in the Maltepe district on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. But the government’s TRT Haber stayed with its regular programming, interrupting it only when Erdogan addressed smaller groups in his travels around Istanbul.

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    Bloomberg explains further of early polling that:

    Erdogan remains the clear frontrunner in Sunday’s presidential election. But most polls show him short of the 50 percent needed for a first-round win — opening the way for a runoff in which an ‘anyone-but-Erdogan’ candidate stands a chance. The president’s AK Party also risks losing its majority in the parliamentary vote the same day.

    But Sunday’s vote is one Erdogan can’t afford to lose and as we noted previously he has carefully put the architecture in place for this moment: 

    The Supreme Electoral Council, the judicial system, and the military — until recently Erdogan’s most dedicated nemesis — are all now under Erdogan’s control. The military was completely denuded of its higher ranks following the July 2016 failed coup attempt…

    …The national press, meanwhile, is completely dominated by Erdogan’s acolytes. The results are unsurprising: In the last two weeks of May, a study demonstrated that the president and his party received far more coverage on three government-owned television stations, including a Kurdish-language one. — Foreign Policy

    The opposition has increasingly relied on social media channels on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Google to overcome the media blackout. However, state censors have had these blocked in the past as well. 

    So what will happen tomorrow?

    via Goldman Sachs,

    Turkey’s elections: Opinion polls point to a close result

    Turkey will hold presidential and parliamentary elections on Sunday, June 24. Voting will close at 5:00pm local time (3:00pm London time) and preliminary results will be announced on Monday. However, unofficial results are likely to be available on Sunday evening on media outlets. In the event that no presidential candidate achieves more than 50% of the vote in the first round, the two candidates with the largest number of votes will face a run-off on Sunday, July 8.

    The election will complete the transition to the new presidential system, with extensive new powers vested in the executive. Unlike previous Turkish elections, this time parties have been able to form alliances, with the 10% threshold for parliamentary representation applying to the alliance as a whole rather than to individual parties. In Exhibit 1, we summarise the policy positions of the government (Cumhur) and opposition (Millet) alliances on key issues.

    Exhibit 1: A summary of the government (Cumhur) and opposition (Millet) key policy positions

    Note: Not all parties in each alliance subscribe to all of these policies, but they represent our best summary of the alliances’ overall views

    Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research

    The latest polling data point to a close outcome in both the parliamentary and – potentially – the presidential elections. In the presidential elections, President Erdogan has a clear lead over his rivals but most polls indicate that he will fall short of the 50% required to win in the first round.

    If the presidential election goes to a second round, polling data point to a close run-off, but a likely Erdogan victory against Muharrem Ince, of the centre-left/secular CHP (Republican People’s Party).

    In the parliamentary elections, polling data suggest that the incumbent AKP-led Cumhur Alliance stands a significant chance of losing its parliamentary majority and the key to the outcome appears to be whether the pro-Kurdish HDP party – the only major party not running as part of an alliance – passes the 10% threshold required for parliamentary representation.

    For financial markets, each of the likely outcomes comes with associated risks.

    In the past, Turkish assets have responded positively to political events that were perceived as increasing political stability, while responding negatively to political instability (Exhibit 2).

    Exhibit 2: Asset prices tend to react positively to the perception of political stability in the short run

    Turkish asset prices one day/week after political events

    Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research

    Viewed from this perspective, a win for the AKP in both the presidential and parliamentary elections would be the most stable outcome. However, President Erdogan’s comments on monetary policy during the election campaign – advocating lower interest rates and indicating that he would play a more active role in monetary policy – have raised concerns over the future direction of monetary policy in the event of this outcome.

    Though one glance at the current state of Turkish stocks, debt, and FX signals this is a considerable concern…

    A split government (with Mr. Erdogan as President and the opposition obtaining a majority in parliament) would likely represent the most negative outcome for Turkish assets, in our view, as it would imply political instability and high levels of uncertainty over the future direction of monetary policy.

    An opposition victory in both elections would also bring significant challenges, not least the task of forming a new government and agreeing on a cohesive legislative programme. However, under the assumption that these challenges can be overcome, we would expect it to be the most market-friendly scenario in the medium term.

     

  • Debunking The Persistent Myth Of U.S. Precision Bombing

    Authored by Nicholas Davies via ConsortiumNews.com,

    U.S. media routinely repeat Pentagon talking points about the accuracy of U.S. bombing, but how precise are these attacks?

    Opinion polls in the United States and the United Kingdom have found that a majority of the public in both countries has a remarkably consistent belief that only about 10,000 Iraqis were killed as a result of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003.

    Estimates of deaths in Iraq actually range from 150,000 to 1.2 million. Part of the reason for the seriously misguided public perception may come from a serious belief in guided weapons, according to what the government tells people about “precision” bombing.  But one must ask how so many people can be killed if these weapons are so “precise,” for instance in one of “the most precise air campaigns in military history,” as a Pentagon spokesman characterized the total destruction last year of Raqqa in Syria.

    The dreadful paradox of “precision weapons” is that the more the media and the public are wrongly persuaded of the near-magical qualities of these weapons, the easier it is for U.S. military and civilian leaders to justify using them to destroy entire villages, towns and cities in country after country: Fallujah, Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq; Sangin and Musa Qala in Afghanistan; Sirte in Libya; Kobane and Raqqa in Syria.

    An Imprecise History

    The skillful use of disinformation about “precision” bombing has been essential to the development of aerial bombardment as a strategic weapon. In a World War II propaganda pamphlet titled the “Ultimate Weapon of Victory”, the U.S. government hailed the B-17 bomber as “… the mightiest bomber ever built… equipped with the incredibly accurate Norden bomb sight, which hits a 25-foot circle from 20,000 feet.“

    However, according to the website WW2Weapons, “With less than 50 per-cent cloud coverage an average B-17 Fortress Group could be expected to place 32.4% of its bombs within 1000 feet of the aiming point when aiming visually.”  That could rise to 60 percent if flying at the dangerously low altitude of 11,000 feet in daylight.

    The inaccurate B17 “Flying Fortress”

    The U.K.’s 1941 Butt Report found that only five percent of British bombers were dropping their bombs within five miles of their targets, and that 49 percent of their bombs were falling in “open country.”

    In the “Dehousing Paper,” the U.K. government’s chief scientific adviser argued that mass aerial bombardment of German cities to “dehouse” and break the morale of the civilian population would be more effective than “precision” bombing aimed at military targets.  British leaders agreed, and adopted this new approach: “area” or “carpet” bombing, with the explicit strategic purpose of “dehousing” Germany’s civilian population.

    The U.S. soon adopted the same strategy against both Germany and Japan, and a U.S. airman quoted in the post-war U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey lampooned efforts at “precision” bombing as a “major assault on German agriculture.”

    The destruction of North Korea by U.S.-led bombing and shelling in the Korean War was so total that U.S. military leaders estimated that they’d killed 20 percent of its population.

    In the American bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the U.S. dropped more bombs than all sides combined in the Second World War, with full scale use of horrific napalm and cluster bombs.  The whole world recoiled from this mass slaughter, and even the U.S. was chastened into scaling back its military ambitions for at least a decade.

    The American War in Vietnam saw the introduction of the “laser-guided smart bomb,” but the Vietnamese soon learned that the smoke from a small fire or a burning tire was enough to confuse its guidance system.  “They’d go up, down, sideways, all over the place,” a GI told Douglas Valentine, the author of The Phoenix Program. “And people would smile and say, ‘There goes another smart bomb!’  So smart a gook with a match and an old tire can fuck it up.”

    Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome

    President Bush Senior hailed the First Gulf War as the moment that America “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”  Deceptive information about “precision” bombing played a critical role in revitalizing U.S. militarism after defeat in Vietnam.

    The U.S. and its allies ruthlessly carpet-bombed Iraq, reducing it from what a UN report later called “a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society” to “a pre-industrial age nation.”  But the Western media enthusiastically swallowed Pentagon briefings and broadcast round-the-clock bomb-sight footage of a handful of successful “precision” strikes as if they were representative of the entire campaign.  Later reports revealed that only seven percent of the 88,500 tons of bombs and missiles devastating Iraq were “precision” weapons.

    The U.S. turned the bombing of Iraq into a marketing exercise for the U.S. war industry, dispatching pilots and planes straight from Kuwait to the Paris Air Show.  The next three years saw record U.S. weapons exports, offsetting small reductions in U.S. arms procurement after the end of the Cold War.

    The myth of “precision” bombing that helped Bush and the Pentagon “kick the Vietnam syndrome” was so successful that it has become a template for the Pentagon’s management of news in subsequent U.S. bombing campaigns. It also gave us the disturbing euphemism “collateral damage” to indicate civilians killed by errant bombs.

    The devastating aerial assault on Baghdad in 2003, known as “shock and awe.”

    ‘Shock and Awe’

    As the U.S. and U.K. launched their “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq in 2003, Rob Hewson, the editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, estimated about 20-25 percent of the U.S. and U.K.’s “precision” weapons were missing their targets in Iraq, noting that this was a significant improvement over the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, when 30-40 percent were off-target. “There’s a significant gap between 100 percent and reality,” Hewson said. “And the more you drop, the greater your chances of a catastrophic failure.”

    Since World War II, the U.S. Air Force has loosened its definition of “accuracy” from 25 feet to 10 meters (39 feet), but that is still less than the blast radius of even its smallest 500 lb. bombs.  So the impression that these weapons can be used to surgically “zap” a single house or small building in an urban area without inflicting casualties and deaths throughout the surrounding area is certainly contrived.

    “Precision” weapons comprised about two thirds of the 29,200 weapons aimed at the armed forces, people and infrastructure of Iraq in 2003.  But the combination of 10,000 “dumb” bombs and 4,000 to 5,000 “smart” bombs and missiles missing their targets meant that about half of “Shock and Awe’s” weapons were as indiscriminate as the carpet bombing of previous wars.  Saudi Arabia and Turkey asked the U.S. to stop firing cruise missiles through their territory after some went so far off-target that they struck their territory. Three also hit Iran.

    “In a war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford to kill any of them,” a puzzled Hewson said. “But you can’t drop bombs and not kill people.  There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.”

    ‘Precision’ Bombing Today

    Since Barack Obama started the bombing of Iraq and Syria in 2014 more than 107,000 bombs and missiles have been launched. U.S. officials claim only a few hundred civilians have been killed. The British government persists in the utterly fantastic claim that none of its 3,700 bombs have killed any civilians at all.

    Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd from Mosul, told Patrick Cockburn of Britain’s  Independent newspaper that he’d seen Kurdish military intelligence reports that U.S. airstrikes and U.S., French and Iraqi artillery had killed at least 40,000 civilians in his hometown, with many more bodies still buried in the rubble.  Almost a year later, this remains the only remotely realistic official estimate of the civilian death toll in Mosul. But no other mainstream Western media have followed up on it.

    The consequences of U.S. air wars are hidden in plain sight, in endless photos and videos. The Pentagon and the corporate media may suppress the evidence, but the mass death and destruction of American aerial bombardment are only too real to the millions of people who have survived it.

  • NJ Governor Pitches 2,400% Tax Increase On Firearms

    New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Phil Murphy is floating a plan to increase taxes on buying and selling guns by up to 2,400%, according to guns.com.

    Murphy estimates that the state will take in an additional $2 million in revenue from the tax, which would include raising handgun purchase permits from $2 to $50, and firearms ID cards required to own a gun or buy ammunition from $5 to $100. Permits to carry a handgun would skyrocket from $50 to $400.

    In comparison, neighboring Delaware and Pennsylvania charge fees for carrying of $65 and $20 respectively. 

    Such taxes, of course, would disproportionately affect the poor – as rich gun owners can simply pay up for personal protection. Given that the average salary of a New Jersey armed security officer is $19.42 an hour, Murphy’s plan puts those who need to carry for their jobs under increased financial burden. 

    In a public signing ceremony for a six-pack of gun control measures last week, Murphy slammed what he characterized as the low fees of firearm licensing in New Jersey. “We must please responsibly increase the fees for gun licenses and handgun permits,” he said. “It’s long past time we did this. The last time these fees were increased was 1966.” –Guns

    Gun dealers would also be affected by the change – with the cost of retail licenses to increase 10-fold from $50 to $500, while manufacturer licenses would jump from $150 to $1,500. The ATF charges similar fees of $200 and $150 respectively. 

    Murphy has rolled back several pro-gun reforms backed by the outgoing Chris Christie (R) administration, while shutting out Second Amendment groups and repeatedly blaming the gun lobby for the state’s violent crime. He’s also appointed a “gun czar,” attorney Bill Castner.

    “Bill Castner will play an active role in enhancing the coalition and will help our administration to advance new common-sense gun measures and potential avenues for legal challenges to stop the scourge of gun violence,” said Murphy, adding “Leading the force for gun violence protection to build safer communities and protect families at the state level is of the utmost importance, and I am confident that Bill will generate ideas and solutions that will save lives.”

    Murphy’s attorney general last week warned a number of gun parts makers they could face civil action for selling unfinished lowers and frames in the state and has been ordered by Murphy to publish a running “shame” list of firearm trace data. –Guns

    So for those living in New Jersey and other states with high taxes on guns; the 2nd Amendment gives you the right to bear arms, if you’re rich enough to pay for it.

  • Facebook, Twitter Deactivate Hezbollah Accounts After Kidnapping Video Published

    Hezbollah’s television and news network Al Manar has confirmed that on Friday the Lebanese paramilitary group’s “War Media” accounts on Twitter and Facebook were closed without notice. Hezbollah is now accusing the social media giants of taking part in an American “anti-media campaign” against the group which has already long been designated a terror organization by the US government. 

    Image via Behind the News

    Al-Manar English explains:

    In a post on the Telegram messaging application, Hezbollah’s Central War Media accused the US-based websites of running an anti-media campaign against the Lebanese resistance movement.

    Facebook and Twitter closed the accounts as part of their efforts to harm the resistance since the social media accounts of the Central War Media play a major role in Hezbollah’s activities, according to the post on Telegram.

    Neither Facebook nor Twitter have yet to give official comment.

    Though it’s not the first time Hezbollah’s Facebook page has been blocked (it occurred in 2017, but later went active again), the move by Facebook and Twitter could be in relation to the current Syrian Army and allied forces major offensive in Syria’s southwest, where a major campaign is underway to liberate Daraa.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Both the US and Israel have issued repeat warnings against Iran-backed or Hezbollah forces being present in the south and near the Israeli occupied Golan; however, some sources on the ground have reported that Damascus is ignoring those warnings, allowing Hezbollah fighters to enter the battle. Pro-rebel social media accounts have also in recent days uploaded what they claim is proof of Hezbollah’s presence in Daraa and Quneitra governates.

    But as Newsweek suggests the social media shutdown could be related to a newly published Hezbollah video showing the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers from along the Israel-Lebanon border over a decade ago, which precipitated 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War: 

    The alleged shutdown comes a day after a Hezbollah social media account published a new video showing the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in 2006, according to Israeli news outlet Ynet News. The Twitter page which published the video is still active, casting doubt over whether the clip played a direct part in the clampdown of the group’s social media presence.

    Controversial footage of the kidnapping was first published in 2012 on the Hezbollah affiliated news channel Al Mayadeen and aired on stations throughout the region, including in Israeli media where it was analyzed on news panels. That particular footage was filmed from a distance. 

    However, the newly released video which may have resulted in Facebook taking action shows a close-up angle of the kidnapping, focusing in on the captured soldiers lying prone just before their vehicle explodes. Hezbollah militants are seen dressed up as IDF soldiers as they ambush the Israeli Humvee and plant explosives.

    Still frame of the 2006 ambush from the newly published Hezbollah video, showing one of the IDF soldiers on the ground (in the blurred section).

    Hezbollah immediately announced on Friday that backup pages and accounts have been established, which the group encouraged followers to utilize. 

    American military analysts and advisers have in the past frequently complained that a US-designated terror group has long been allowed broad usage of US-based social media platforms. 

    In 2006 a New York man was arrested and charged for providing US residents with access to Hezbollah’s satellite channel, al-Manar. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison for material support of a terrorist organization.

  • The Indian Crossroads: Will Modi Choose Putin Or Trump?

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

    India just imposed reciprocal tariffs against the US in response to the ones that Trump just applied against steel and aluminum imports.

    According to a filing that the Indian government made to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the tariffs on almonds, apples, certain motorcycles, and walnuts are intended to compensate for the estimated $240 million a year that India is expected to lose because of Trump’s tariffs, which represents a stunningly independent move from the Great Power that’s hitherto been doing everything that it could to remain in the US’ “good graces”.

    India’s 2016 LEMOA logistics deal with the US unprecedentedly made the two countries military-strategic partners, and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson even spoke about plans for them to remain so all throughout the 21st century. That said, the economic relationship between them has lagged far behind their military-strategic one, with India failing to attract US investors to its so-called “Make In India” domestic development program.

    New Delhi may have thought that it could woo American factories from neighboring China amidst the deteriorating trade ties between Beijing and Washington, but much to its surprise, Trump remained true to his campaign pledge that he wants US companies returning back to the homeland and not to simply “re-offshore” elsewhere.

    As a result, India no longer considers itself to be as indispensable to the US’ 21st-century plans to “contain” China like it previously thought that it was, seeing as how the economic dimension of this grand partnership is being deliberately neglected in favor of focusing solely on its military-strategic aspects. India’s plans for becoming a world power are unsustainable without the strong growth that would be afforded by a 1990s China-like economic partnership with the US, and its decision makers are now beginning to fear the consequences of indefinitely remaining the US’ “junior partner” for the rest of the century.

    It’s with these worries in mind – as well as the ever-present threat of CAATSA sanctions should it go forward with its planned S-400 missile deal with Russia – that Prime Minister Modi paid informal visits to his Chinese and Russian counterparts in providing India with the option of a Eurasian “rebalancing” in the event that its pro-Atlantic pivot of recent years fails to yield the expected comprehensive – and especially economic – dividends.

    There’s still a lot of lingering distrust between India and China that probably won’t ever fully go away, which is why India’s new strategy might be to rely on Russia as a means for “balancing” its relations between the US and China in a bid to clinch better deals from each.

    Unfortunately for India, the US will inevitably force New Delhi to choose between it and Russia.

    The ‘best-case’ scenario of siding with the US over Russia is that India will remain among the most privileged of Washington’s ‘junior partners’, while the worst-case eventuality is that it will be provoked into a border conflict with China.

    As for the Russian angle of this equation, the most advantageous outcome is that Moscow brokers a deal between India and China to combine their competing “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” and Silk Road megaprojects into a single hemisphere-wide multipolar connectivity network, while the “worst” that can happen in this scenario is that Russia remains the “balancing” fulcrum for managing India and China’s continued competition in Afro-Eurasia.

    India is therefore at an historic crossroads that will determine its strategic trajectory across the coming century, and it’ll probably have to make an irreversible decision by the end of this year.

  • "Musk Went Ballistic" – The Inside Story Of Tesla's Feud With Federal Regulators

    Given the bizarre outbursts and increasingly grandiose performance-related promises (even as his company’s Fremont factory has continued to struggle), many have speculated that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been cracking under the pressure. In one sign that the pressures of running Tesla (not to mention SpaceX and Neuralink) have been weighing on the CEO, some have pointed out that he’s becoming increasingly vindictive toward anybody who doubts or questions him: for example, he recently spent $25 million of his own money on Tesla shares just to blow up a few shorts after tweeting threats of “unreal carnage”.

    In a story that lays bare Musk’s obsession with his public image and his  inability to tolerate criticism or dissent from his employees or the media, Buzzfeed published a piece late Thursday that’s packed with alarming details, including the story of Musk’s meltdown during a conversation with regulators from the National Transportation Safety Board.

    Musk

    An outburst from Musk that ended the conversation prompted the NTSB to announce that Tesla would no longer be cooperating with the investigation. In a separate incident, Musk went “ballistic” during a conversation with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after a representative informed Elon Musk that the agency would be announcing an investigation into a May 2016 crash involving a Tesla Model S in Florida.

    No one lectures Elon Musk. In April, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board discovered this after a call about his organization’s investigation into one of Tesla Motors’ autopiloted vehicles devolved into a heated exchange, leading the billionaire entrepreneur to hang up on the federal regulator. That fiery interaction eventually leaked to the press and ricocheted around the internet as further evidence that Musk was losing it.

    […]

    For example, in June 2016 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had contacted Tesla as a courtesy heads-up that it would be announcing an investigation into a May crash that killed the driver of a Model S sedan on Autopilot. It was the kind of call that, at most companies, would require executive restraint and sensitivity. Musk was not originally supposed to be on the call with NHTSA officials, Tesla’s general counsel, and the head of its Autopilot team, but chimed in as the conversation got underway. It was unfair that NHTSA was targeting his company, he said, noting that skeptics would just use the public investigation as evidence that Tesla was in trouble.

    After failing to convince the government officials to keep their investigation private and forgo their announcement scheduled for the next day, Musk went ballistic and embarked on a profanity-laced tirade. He threatened to sue NHTSA for what he saw as unfair scrutiny and then abruptly disconnected the phone, leaving the people left on the line shocked.

    “I couldn’t believe it,” said a former Tesla employee familiar with the call.

    Musk’s recent behavior isn’t a deviation: It’s more or less how he’s always acted around his employees. 

    But the thing is: None of this is new for Musk. He has always been the architect of his own image and has long run roughshod over journalists and his own communications team alike. In interviews with BuzzFeed News, nine people who previously worked with Musk, and who requested anonymity to preserve their personal and professional relationships, said that while the level of scrutiny on the CEO may be new, his behavior is not. What we are seeing is less a crack in his well-being than his facade. It is Elon unbound.

    His short temper has “long been legend” inside Tesla and SpaceX, according to Buzzfeed. The only thing that’s changed, they say, is that Musk’s profile – and the company’s share price – has risen.

    What’s changed is simply that Musk’s profile has risen while his staff’s ability to keep him in check has waned. As pressure continues to mount and Musk sheds the executives who once provided advice and insulation, he’s no longer just the Mars-bound genius with a promising electric car company. Depending on who you ask, he’s an icon, an environmental champion, or an attention-hungry micromanager, wielding Steve Jobs–level influence in 240-character Twitter diatribes, occasional public appearances, or mocking conference calls with analysts. But no matter which Elon you choose, it’s become more apparent that there’s no one who can rein him in.

    Musk’s inability to let go of anything remotely negative spouted by his critics and the media makes working on his communications staff – whether at Tesla or at SpaceX – a waking nightmare.

    This obsession with the media makes working in communications under Musk, whether at Tesla or SpaceX, an unpredictable and grueling gig. Multiple former staffers recalled being kept up late or woken up in the middle of the night because Musk was upset about a headline or an article. Two other former senior employees described Musk as notoriously thin-skinned. “He’ll read an obscure critical post by, like, some Belgian blogger at 3 in the morning and he’ll wake up people on the comms team and demand this person be crushed,” one former employee said. “It’s all utterly disproportionate in response.”

    If you’re thinking that some of Musk’s tendencies – particularly his treatment of the media – sound familiar, well, former Musk employees would agree. Several of Buzzfeed‘s sources independently compared working for Musk with working in the Trump White House, the outlet said.

    The lack of control and continual need to put out PR fires wore on professionals, even those who personally liked Musk and believed in the missions of Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla is known for a high rate of turnover, and some communications staffers only last a few months. Some have done multiple stints, though have left or were fired after clashing with the chief executive. Three people familiar with Musk’s communications team independently compared the pressure and publicity, and chaos of the job to working in President Donald Trump’s White House.

    This has already been a rough week for Tesla. Musk has already had to downsize Solar City’s residential solar business and finish laying off 9% of Tesla’s staff (while continuing to deny that the company is having funding troubles). And this embarrassing Buzzfeed story is one more distraction for the mogul, who’s desperately trying to bring Model 3 production up to 2,500 cars a week by the end of June. If he fails at that task, we imagine there will be another round of outbursts as Musk continues his crusade against the Tesla bears and everybody else who doubts his vision.

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