The Nasty Blowback From America’s Wars: The Brutalizers and the Brutalized (Ray McGovern)

[Octafish]

The Nasty Blowback From America’s Wars

The Brutalizers and the Brutalized

by RAY McGOVERN
CounterPunch, APRIL 13, 2015

Brutality thrives in American police treatment of common citizens reflecting an ethos of violence that has flourished over the past dozen years with almost no one in authority held accountable. Much of this behavior can be traced back to U.S. wars of choice – and it is not as though we were not warned of the inevitable blowback.

On Feb. 26, 2003, three weeks before the U.S./UK attack on Iraq, Coleen Rowley, then division counsel and special agent at the FBI office in Minneapolis, had the prescience and the guts to send a letter to then FBI Director Robert Mueller. The New York Times published it a week later.

Rowley warned Mueller that launching unjustified war would prove counterproductive in various ways. One blowback she highlighted was that the rationale being applied to allow preemptive strikes abroad could migrate back home, “fostering a more permissive attitude toward shootings by law enforcement officers in this country.” Tragically, the recent spate of murders by police has proved Rowley right.

And not only killing. Police brutality toward the citizenry, some of it by former soldiers who themselves were brutalized by war, has soared. Yet, the dark side of what was done by U.S. troops abroad as well as the damage that was done to their psyches and sense of morality is rarely shown in the U.S. mainstream media, which prefers to veer between romanticizing the adventure of war and lamenting the physical harm done to America’s maimed warriors.

SNIP...

Gratuitous Beatings

Cases of police beating citizens who are detained or taken into custody have multiplied, with police offenders frequently held to the same unconscionable let’s-not-look-back “accountability” that has let George W. Bush and Dick Cheney walk free – so far – for launching the “war of aggression” on Iraq.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/13/the-brutalizers-and-the-brutalized/

Thanks to war for profit, America's going GESTAPO unless We the People put a stop to it.

[marmar]

1. K/R

[Octafish]

3. What they do to others overseas, they always come back to do at home.

Mark Twain observed. Prof. Alfred McCoy explains how domestic spying is about blackmail, not national security, in police states.

During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America. In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” Indeed, just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words, colonial police methods came home to serve as a template for the creation of an American internal security apparatus in wartime. -- http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175724/

McCoy, as you know, is a true scholar -- one who tells the truth, even when inconvenient for those that run the show and handle the payroll.

Surveillance and Scandal

Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power

By Alfred McCoy
Tomgram, Jan. 19, 2014

For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.

For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.

[font color="green"]Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.[/font color]

A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside

Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables.

This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began. Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.

CONTINUED...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175795/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_it's_about_blackmail,_not_national_security/

Some days, I wonder what's next to get the domestic roll-out.

[riderinthestorm]

2. You are the voice calling out in the darkness. Thanks for this Octafish!

K&R!!!

[Octafish]

4. You are most welcome, riderinthestorm!

Here's how the police in New York City treated Ray for asking trying to ask former CIA/Army Gen David Petraeus a question:

Thank you for the kind words. Your grokking the situation means the world to me -- and democracy to us.

[Pooka Fey]

5. Great post, Octafish

Somebody predicted another one of the many consequences of the Iraq invasion back in 2003.

Rowley warned Mueller that launching unjustified war would prove counterproductive in various ways. One blowback she highlighted was that the rationale being applied to allow preemptive strikes abroad could migrate back home, “fostering a more permissive attitude toward shootings by law enforcement officers in this country.” Tragically, the recent spate of murders by police has proved Rowley right.

It all just makes me so tired.

[Octafish]

7. Agent Rowley also asked Washington FBI for permission to search 9-11 hijacker Moussaoui's laptop.

Just days before September 11, Rowley and FBI in Minneapolis had been warned of the oddball who was only interested in "turning" 747s in flight, not at all in taking off or landing. So...the flight instructors called the FAA. They called FBI who told them to "Fuggedaboudit." The flight instructors had to actually call their Congressman, Sensenbrenner, to get any action on the part of the FBI and all they did was arrest the guy. If the FBI had listened to her, they'd likely have discovered the so-called "20th hijacker" had downloaded all sorts of flight data for jumbo jets on to his PC.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Octafish/35

This should be on tee vee and taught in history class, but, for some strange reason, it's not.

[CanSocDem]

6. Just yesterday...

...I saw televised news coverage of the sentencing of 4 Blackwater mercenaries for the murder of Iraqi citizens. Well staged I thought, like good television advertising.


k & r


.

[Octafish]

8. Blackwater, torture and US imperialism

30 False Fronts Won Contracts for Blackwater

By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI
The New York Times, September 3, 2010

WASHINGTON — Blackwater Worldwide created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, according to Congressional investigators and former Blackwater officials.

While it is not clear how many of those businesses won contracts, at least three had deals with the United States military or the Central Intelligence Agency, according to former government and company officials. Since 2001, the intelligence agency has awarded up to $600 million in classified contracts to Blackwater and its affiliates, according to a United States government official.

The Senate Armed Services Committee this week released a chart that identified 31 affiliates of Blackwater, now known as Xe Services. The network was disclosed as part of a committee’s investigation into government contracting. The investigation revealed the lengths to which Blackwater went to continue winning contracts after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007. That episode and other reports of abuses led to criminal and Congressional investigations, and cost the company its lucrative security contract with the State Department in Iraq.

The network of companies — which includes several businesses located in offshore tax havens — allowed Blackwater to obscure its involvement in government work from contracting officials or the public, and to assure a low profile for any of its classified activities, said former Blackwater officials, who, like the government officials, spoke only on condition of anonymity.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/world/middleeast/04blackwater.html?_r=2&ref=global-home&

* Learned the above thanks to DU: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022781265#post8

[DeSwiss]

10. At the end, Rome depended on mercenaries to fight its wars......

...and the mercenary Huns and other Germanic groups such as the Vandals, Lombards, Alamanni, Goths, Franks, and Burgundians -- all now seeing how weak Rome truly was (and how rich), turned on them and brought down the rotting carcass and devoured it.

- And as Santayana warned: ''Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.''

[Octafish]

12. Chalmers Johnson warned us.

Please search-n-scroll down for the archived talks:

http://www.tucradio.org/contact.html

These are indeed damned times, at least for those who believe in democracy, justice and the Constitution of the United States.

[DeSwiss]

9. K&R

''As empires collapse, they turn inward, and subject their own populations to the same ill treatment to which they subjected others. Here, America is unexceptional: the number of Americans being murdered by their own police, with minimal repercussions for those doing the killing, is quite stunning. When Americans wonder who their enemy really is, they need look no further.''

~Dmitry Orlov

[Octafish]

11. Democracy is an Enemy of the Elite

"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves... l don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."

-- Henry Kissinger on the US-backed coup d'etat in Chile.

And we wonder why the US keeps moving to the right, even when we vote in leaders who promise to move things to the left.

[JEB]

13. The war comes home.

[Octafish]

14. Back in the Iran-Contra days...

Cover-up and Blowback

What Congress Left Out of the Iran-Contra Report

by Jonathan Marshall
Middle East Report published in MER151

The House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran and Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1987.)

Of the millions of Americans who watched some or all of the televised hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal during the summer of 1987, only a handful will slog through the 690 pages of fine print that make up the final report of the congressional investigating committees. That’s a shame, because the report succeeds in many areas where the hearings failed dismally.

Where the hearings wandered aimlessly and confused the public with their diffuse findings, the report has an admirably clear structure, narrative and conclusion. Clear lines of argument emerge in the majority and minority reports. No obnoxious Brendan Sullivan is on hand to disrupt the reader; no gap-toothed Oliver North stands at the reader’s side to make speeches or elicit false sympathy. The majority report, unlike so many committee members during the hearings, even refrains from calling the Nicaraguan rebels “freedom fighters.”

This massively documented tome paints a devastating picture of fraud, crime, cover-up, venality, duplicity and stupidity. Even those who have followed the scandal closely may be stunned by its detailed portrait of North trading not only arms and top-secret intelligence but the interests of entire nations (Kuwait, Iraq) in his quest to free a few American hostages; of Admiral John Poindexter and his crew lying not only to Congress but to nearly every senior member of the administration; of Attorney General Edwin Meese issuing off-the-cuff opinions to ratify blatant law-breaking by top officials; and of President Reagan shamelessly lying his way through press conferences in late 1986.

Voluminous as it is, however, the report withholds the full story. Some of the gaps stem from causes beyond the committees’ power: the death of CIA director William Casey, the hectic shredding of documents by Oliver North, the difficulty of retrieving the full contents of the NSC computer system, administration delays in turning over vital materials, and the impossibility of interviewing many foreign witnesses, especially Israelis.

Yet the report’s silence on several key issues was a matter of conscious choice, not ignorance, and says as much about congressional resistance to the truth as the report itself says of the administration’s willingness to lie. The neglected areas include what could be called “operational embarrassments,” the historical context of the Iran-Contra affair, the role of Israel, and the fundamental contradictions between covert operations and a democratic society.

SNIP...

Ultimately, however, the report’s greatest weakness is its failure to go beyond pleas for better executive branch compliance with the law in the future. It missed the chance to take a more profound look at the unbearable tension between covert operations and democratic government. The one thrives on secrecy, the other on openness; the former on manipulation and law-breaking, the latter on following rules. As the report’s own evidence suggests, in the course of targeting the Third World with propaganda, deception and intimidation operations, the administration turned the same tactics on its opponents at home. Intelligence professionals call this phenomenon “blowback.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.merip.org/mer/mer151/cover-blowback

For some reason cough CIA all that was forgotten and Poppy and crew lived to play another day.



Thank you for grokking, JEB.

[malaise]

15. Every elected official and all the chicken hawks should be forced to read this article

Add the treatment of the Occupy Movement to the list of police brutality.

[JEB]

16. K&R for the original post and subsequent informative posts and links.