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THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE ISRAEL
LOBBY
Former top
CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison give CounterPunchers
the real scoop on the Israel lobby and precisely how powerful
it is. Read
how US presidents from Wilson, through FDR to Truman were manipulated
by the Zionist lobby; how Israel bent LBJ, Reagan and Clinton
to its purpose; how Bush's White House has been the West Wing
of the Israeli government; how Washington's revolving doors send
full-time Israel lobbyists from think-tanks to the National Security
Council and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. For all who want a
true measure of the Lobby's power, the Christisons' 8-page dossier,
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Army spokesmen are saying that the murders
of 24 Iraqi civilians, most of them women and young children,
at Haditha last November took place because the troops just weren't
well enough trained.
I don't believe that, and neither
should you.
The Defense Department is saying
that it is going to initiate a huge training program that will
keep such incidents from happening in the future.
I don't believe that either,
and neither should you.
It has been, admittedly, a
long time, but I do not remember anyone ever during the whole
time I was in the Marines telling us "It is a bad thing
to shoot to death unarmed men, women and children who pose no
threat to you and who have not done or even seemed to want to
do you any harm." Neither do I remember anybody ever during
the whole time I was in the Marines telling us, "It is not
okay to kill innocent civilians because you are pissed off because
one of your guys got hurt earlier in the day someplace else."
I do remember them telling
us to keep mud out of the muzzles of our weapons, to take care
of our feet, and not to salute indoors.
I remember lots of things from
those years. But I cannot remember anyone of any rank telling
us that we shouldn't shoot to death unarmed little kids and women
and working stiffs and old guys.
If anybody had said anything
that stupid to us someone surely would have said what someone
always said when somebody said something really, really, really
stupid: "No shit?"
None of the interviewers on
network and cable stations these past few weeks, however, has
said that or anything close like it to any of the generals and
Defense Department officials they've had on the air doing the
administration's damage control. Again and again, the brasshats
or suits have talked about training failed or training needed,
and not one interviewer from "Newshour" to the flacks
at Fox has said, "No shit?"
The White House and Pentagon
love the excuse of "inadequate training" because it
makes atrocities the result of innocent procedural negligence
or "a few bad apples" rather than the result and acknowledgement
of the administration's basic policy.
The excuse of "inadequate
training" came up after Lt. William Calley's platoon murdered
as many as 500 old men, women and children in the Vietnamese
village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. There are other similarities
in My Lai and Haditha. The secondary excuse for My Lai was that
the platoon had earlier lost some members and the soldiers were
pissed off; the Haditha Marines were, it is said, enraged because
they'd lost a buddy some time earlier. The My Lai story only
came out because it appeared on CBS and in the New Yorker, up
to which time the military was doing everything it could to cover
the murders up; the Haditha story came out because somebody leaked
it to Time, which published a scathing article. Before
the Time article, DoD had no public interest in the murders
at Haditha at all.
"Inadequate training"
was also the Defense Department's primary excuse for its torture
program at Abu Ghraib. That ugliness went public only because
some idiot with a digital camera and laptop posted some of the
atrocity photos on a website. The Defense Department worked very
hard to play that one down, and it fought very hard to keep any
more of the hundreds of other digital photographs from coming
out, as if the evil we did not get to see would therefore be
evil that never happened. (DoD continues to be, according to
Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story, successful in
suppressing videos which are far more awful than any of the digital
photographs.)
But Haditha was no more a function
of "inadequate training" than was My Lai or Abu Ghraib.
Each of them was a direct consequence of US policies at the highest
levels, policies that said the US had the right to apply deadly
force halfway around the world in pursuit of what its leaders
had decided in secret were the country's national interest. All
three atrocities happened because the presidential administrations
in power declared the lives of distant individuals trivial, disposable,
theoretical.
In each of those events, the
troops scorned for atrocities (Calley was the only one who got
a sentence out of My Lai, and that was only house arrest for
a few months; no officer went into the dock for Abu Ghraib, just
a few enlisted losers) were in fact carrying out US policy without
the window-dressing, without the bullshit. They performed what
was in America's heart of darkness. In My Lai, they were in a
script written for them by Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara;
in Iraq it has been a script crafted by George W. Bush, Donald
Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
Those dumb bastards at My Lai
and Haitha pulled the triggers, but who put those guns in their
hands, and to what end? Those thugs at Abu Ghraib performed
those abominations, but who were their spiritual and moral leaders?
Were they evil, those torturers
and murderers? What about the leaders who sent them there and
who wrote their scripts? Who told Calley's thugs that we had
more right to tell Vietnamese what to do with their country than
the Vietnamese? Who told the torturers at Abu Ghraib and the
murderers at Haditha (and the killers and torturers at all those
other places where the cover-ups worked as they were supposed
to) we had more right to tell Iraqis what to do with their country
than Iraqis? Who stood on the deck of a carrier in a flight suit
with a padded crotch and told the world that our power was given
to us by God but comes out of the muzzle of a gun and if you
don't like it watch what we do next?
Calley's platoon of murderers,
the torturers at Abu Ghraib, the Haditha killers who, in one
family alone gunned down children of 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1: the
problem isn't that they weren't sufficiently trained. The problem
is that they were trained far too well.
Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor at
University at Buffalo and editor of the web journal BuffaloReport.com.
Temple University Press will publish his book "Telling Stories"
early next year.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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