John McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?

“I am a war criminal; I bombed innocent women and children”

-John McCain

So in what should be no surprise to anybody it turns out that John McCain is really no different than say Rudy Giuliani outside of military service of course but I’ll get to that in awhile. He is a charlatan, a philanderer, a hypocrite, a panderer and a man whose judgment and hair trigger temper should not allow him to occupy the oval office, that is if anything resembling a change is really to occur. McCain has always portrayed himself as this great incorruptible figure who would stand up against the special interests, reign in the torture state and work in something resembling bipartisanship that would somehow defuse the festering hatred that has transcended the ‘my team vs. your team’, win at all costs corrosiveness that has created factions in America that could one day equal the kind of generational hatred that is passed down in Europe and far less exceptional places that God’s other chosen land. He was a maverick, he was different and even Mr. Republican himself the great Rush Hudson Limbaugh III who is the personification of every single element of the GOP hates his guts but then the story broke.

The damned liberal New York Times in typical style as the propaganda arm of the great commie liberal conspiracy that has been doing it’s damned best to over throw this great and mighty country had the audacity to launch a dastardly smear campaign against McCain with a story of a potential affair with a telecommunications lobbyist that was really so much more than the lurid sort of lemming food sex scandal that the American idiots regularly wallow in. It really isn’t about sex at all but about corruption, about the great John McCain wallowing in the slop with lobbyists, lying to cover it up, bringing pressure on the Times to withhold the story until after Super Tuesday and then there is that ugly little thing about playing games with the campaign finance laws. So despite the frenzied attempts by the neocons to change the subject to the damned liberal New York times over Manchurian Mac’s alleged sexual dalliances the far bigger bombshell in the story is that the ‘straight talk express’ is nothing more than another corrupt business as normal whore house shuttle. There undoubtedly will be more on this story of corruption, lies and the public relations spin that has allowed for the canonization of yet another of the scoundrels who have so thoroughly contributed to the moral rot of the empire, you can count on that.

What the Times story does to a larger extent is to catapult the propaganda and allow for a look at McCain’s serial dishonesty, his fervor for war and his veracity as a ‘war hero’. Put quite simply, any man who comes out in favor of preserving the Bush-Cheney junta’s dictatorial right to use water boarding, a torture method so foul that it was used by the masters of the Spanish Inquisition while trying to parlay his own past as one who was tortured into political power while playing up his victim status as a POW who was also reportedly tortured is amoral, cynical and exploitative. A portrait of a career charlatan is only slowly emerging although the signs have always been there back to his involvement with the Keating Five scandal and running up to his hijacking of the Iraq war and occupation as his hallmark issue stating that despite the obvious facts that ‘stuff was getting better’ when the carnage raged and the bodies stank in the streets, rotting and being eaten by packs of starving dogs outside of the Green Zone. There was that ridiculous stroll through that market with Lindsay ‘five rugs for five bucks’ Graham with nearly half the fucking army in tow that was exposed as so much stagecraft during that now famous 60 Minutes segment last spring and McCain’s political aspirations appeared to be on life support. But that was before the Surge and the Vichy Democrat’s surrender on efforts to stop the war that they lied about in order to be given control over Congress in November 2006. McCain was suddenly off the ropes and back in business again.

And like Flintstone with “Gazoo” every time that McCain found himself in trouble on Iraq he just invoked “General Petraeus” and was out of any jam and his symbiotic relationship with Joe Lieberman which went over well with the same high rolling Jews that fund the campaigns of those of both parties who are acceptable to the neocons as well as his shilling for the American Enterprise Institute put Insane McCain back in the game again. He used the wizardry of a master in getting out in front with the game plan to incinerate everything that moves within 1000 miles of Israel which of course makes the Raptureheads pee in their undergarments in anticipation of their teleportation while the world immolates. But the “Surge” isn’t working, it has all been one gigantic bait and switch in which taxpayer money is buying time by paying off Sunni insurgents not to fight Americans. That dirty little deal along with the ethnic cleansing have more to do with the reduction of violence along with the hermetically sealed media than any real political success. It’s all to buy time so that dirty little fuck up in Mesopotamia doesn’t play havoc with the election or any of the two chosen neocons who would be warmonger in chief, McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And if McCain is so brazenly lying about his holier than thou bullshit about being different and above corruption you really have to wonder how much else of his tailor made for mass consumption by the moronic, television addicted lemmings is also more of the same bullshit. Could he also be lying about Vietnam?

Let’s talk about Nam, that nasty little quagmire in the American subconscious always waiting to be sprung like a bouncing betty whenever it is politically opportunistic, we are still fighting that fucking war and will continue to fight that fucking war until we as a nation are ready to collectively acknowledge the accumulated weight of all of our military interventionist sins and to seek atonement. That John McCain can continue to trade on his Vietnam record as he runs his campaign on the promise of more war for the rest of all of our lives even if it bankrupts us and rapes the futures of those who have yet to even be fucking born. Now I have a lot of problems with this great narrative that McCain has constructed for himself about being this great war hero, first let me say that there is absolutely nothing fucking heroic in dropping bombs on civilians and McCain himself has come out and admitted this when questioned during interviews, he correctly called himself “a war criminal” during another 60 Minutes interview back in 1997.

The Democrats and the more flaccid spined liberals out there with their pet issues snap to attention when it comes time to bestow their platitudes on the great and almighty war hero John McCain who will happily continue to send young men and women to their deaths if and when he snags the keys to the war machine. I have always found this sort of deferential treatment to be not only pathetic but self-defeating as well, the quisling Dems to use a sports analogy are all too happy to spot their opponent a two touchdown lead before they even take to the field for the opening kickoff. This is an area where I am flummoxed especially after the treatment that was given to John Kerry (a foofy haired elitist doofus who actually was something of a war hero) when he was savagely swiftboated by a Karl Rove operation back in 2004. Of course Kerry also came out against the war in his now legendary winter soldier hearings that peeled back the flags from the faces of the armchair patriots and the deniers which was and to this day is still a big taboo in a country that bathes in the blood of the innocent that are murdered by the war machine that has made death out top national export. It is far easier to decry Kerry for statements such as:

“They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

Glorifying a man like McCain for whistling Dixie and then bombing the fuck out of people who he didn’t even have the guts to look at when they were sucking in jellied fire with their dying breath while vilifying Kerry is so typically Amerikan. McCain saluted the flag, did time in the Hanoi Hilton where according to who you believe received favorable treatment and then he made anti American propaganda videos of the same sort have carved a scarlet letter of “treason” onto the forehead of Jane Fonda for the last three and a half fucking decades not to mention every person who speaks out against our great wars of conquest rather than to just be a God kissed patriotic American who is content to watch television, go shopping and be a productive little cog in the murderous machine of industrialized murder that is our grand stinking capitalist empire of rot and death.

John McCain is no war hero, he is a war criminal that is plain and simple and in addition to being a war criminal he is also by definition a terrorist for committing terrorist acts against unarmed civilians and no amount of hand wringing fake moralizing is ever going to overturn that ugly and rancid little fact. War IS terrorism and no man who praises war as a way of life as does McCain is nothing other than a terrorist himself. Consider the irony of that particular statement for a minute and the now institutionalized phony war on terror that has brought the war, eternal war home to America as our way of life. None other than that flaming leftist Patrick J. Buchanan acknowledges that war is terror in relation to the bombings of Japan that would bring about an end to World War II and spawn the post war era of as Gore Vidal calls it “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. Buchanan despite the blanket discrediting he receives both by the pathetic mess that passed for the left these days and the neocon right is actually spot on about many things in these horrible days of a rotting empire and he asks the question: “But if terrorism is the massacre of innocents to break the will of rulers, were not Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorism on a colossal scale?”

The dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy and whether it was ultimately necessary against a broken enemy or was merely an opening gambit in the Cold War will be debated until the end of our days but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be interpreted by most as necessary steps to end a long, cruel and far too bloody war and to spare even more American casualties. I can even see the validity of this argument although I am not a convert but these were only two events, albeit massive in the systematic destruction and the breaking of the will of the Land of the Rising Sun. Regarding the bombing of Japan an excellent resource would be Errol Morris’s excellent documentary the Fog of War during which he interviews at length former Secretary of Defense and Viet Nam war architect Robert McNamara who was Rumsfeld before Rumsfield in his arrogance. The film while not depicting the slaughter on the ground offered a glimpse into the methodology of industrialized mass murder. General Curtis LeMay, McNamara’s superior and the commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command that devastated the Japanese Home Islands in the late days of the war plays a prominent part. In the film McNamara explains his role in the incendiary attack by chillingly reducing it to the banality of number crunching as to the potential casualty tally. LeMay, who was savagely lampooned in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as General Jack D. Ripper who kicks off nuclear Armageddon is featured in actual film clips that are among the most interesting parts of the movie.

In a precursor to modern corporate number crunching the bombing run efficiency was maximized to the point where stripped B-29s were sent in flying so low that they literally reeked of burning flesh, a good and short although militaristic account on LeMay and the bombing has been written by Victor Davis Hanson and entitled The Right Man, this piece is featured in the World War II compilation called No End Save Victory, a pretty good book of essays that you could likely pick up cheap online. The ruthless efficiency of the incendiary bombings even had LeMay himself to comment that “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”.

On the nights of March 9 & 10 in 1945 Tokyo was subjected to an incredible incendiary bombardment that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city, boiling asphalt and cooking flesh. Although the true number will never be known it is estimated that nearly 100,000 were killed, most incinerated and most civilians including women and children and the helpless elderly. The fire consumed the city structures that were mainly built out of wood and the heat according to Nicholas Von Hoffman as referenced in Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters” But this is always the way that it is in war isn’t it? General LeMay was correct, the victors are never the war criminals and never the terrorists, the infamy as well as the true costs of aggression are not ultimately paid by the warmongers but suffered by the poor bastards who just happen to live under the rule of rogue governments or those that otherwise fall into disfavor with the most powerful of nations. The truth is that America has a long history of employing and glorifying war criminals, Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and both George Bushes were the pros but John McCain is a rising star who with his star-crossed past and maniacal zeal to wage war could yet challenge every one of them when it comes to racking up the body count, and he already has kills on his personal ledger.

Considering how McCain has been right up there with putting his seal of approval on George W. Bush’s torture state despite the alleged hell that he endured while a POW not only makes the story itself suspect but any man who has undergone that sort of torture and who comes out in defense of torture is a goddamned hypocrite and is unfit for any sort of high political office let alone that of Commander in Chief.

John McCain’s free pass as a strait shooting war hero needs to be revoked for it is now apparent that he is neither.

Pissing In The Neocon Holiday Punchbowl

Chalk up a rare score for the real government against the usurpers and traitors in Dick Cheney’s shadow government and their Pentagon and media moles who piggybacked their filthy little coup d’etat onto the ‘terrorist’ attacks of 9/11 using Edward Luttwak’s model and their parallel COG (Continuity Of Government) infrastructure. Monday’s surprise release of the explosive National Intelligence Estimate bombshell on Iran’s nuclear weapons program continues to reverberate with the usurpers of the levers of American power desperately scrambling to keep the attack plans for a strike on Iran in play. This running drop kick to the groin of the war mongers in their run up to another war also sadly put a damper on the return of the prodigal Wolfowitz as well not exactly the welcome back gift that the comb sucking freak would have expected. Junta leader George W. Bush in trying to polish the turd that is his neocon kill em all and let God sort em out laterforeign policy trotted out for a press conference and in his typical stuttering and inarticulate style like some drunken loser of a salesman who just can’t close the deal badgered reporters and reinterpreted the NIE to continue Cheney’s PNAC agenda:

“And so, you know, kind of Psychology 101 ain’t working. It’s just not working, you know? I am — I understand the issues. I clearly see the problems and I’m going to use the NIE to continue to rally the international community for the sake of peace.”

But the real questions have yet to be seriously asked by the lapdog press corps and the national pocket media – why have the Bush-Cheney-Neocon Axis of Evil continued to mount a massive international propaganda campaign to gin up an attack on Iran if the conclusions of the NIE have been known for months?

The constant barrage of apocalyptic conjecture on the same level with the smoking guns as mushroom clouds that led to the disaster in Iraq has been broadcast by every one of the same corrupt media outlets that were accomplices in allowing the Bushists to lie the country into that war and now the same brazen fabrications and outright fibs are being peddled again. Dan Froomkin did a good piece the other day on Le Enfant Terrible’s press conference in his White House Watch column over at the Washington Post online entitled Neck-Snapping Spin From the President and has been hot on the follow up all week so check it out. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has also been hot on Bush’s deliberate ramping up of the rhetoric to attack Iran despite knowing the NIE’s conclusions and were Congress to have either a spine or a willingness to stand up to the 800 pound gorillas of the Israel Lobby there would be preparations for impeachment on the table right now as well as a serious investigation into how deep that the rabbit hole really goes when it comes to the infiltration and influence of the American political apparatus. Another wing would need to be added at Gitmo to imprison all of the traitors who have colluded to lure this country into wars against America’s self interests. Right now The Lobby is in overdrive working to keep the game rigged in their favor and given that it is an election year and our corrupt politicians grovel at their feet for the campaign contibutions that are like crack cocaine to any seeking to be competitive my money is on them.

It should be no surprise that some of the loudest bitching outside of the usual snake pits and mole nests like the American Enterprise Institute and the National Review Online naturally comes from that shitty little oasis of corruption, violence and paranoia that has been the bane of our existence over the past seven fucking years of one sided Muslim smashing foreign policy. The right-wing extremists who control the state of Israel are apoplectic as the selling of their war as America’s war is now openly being called out as the bullshit that it always has been. Iran is not an existential threat to America, never has been and never will be no matter how much the neocon propaganda mills churn out fake stories about Iranian Jews being forced to wear yellow badges , that Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage takers at the American embassy back in 1979 (this one resonates especially well with members of the Reagan cult), that Iran had dispatched suicide bomb teams to the U.S. and Europe, that Ahmadinejad threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” which was a mistranslation (likely intentional) that has been used to launch the entire Iran as Nazi Germany product line, that Iran was behind a buildup of Hezbollah in South America to strike the U.S. and in what truly is designed to appeal to the prurient interests of lurid sex obsessed America that Iran was going to start executing porn stars – this one was so embarassing that CNN has since taken it down. After the NIE, the cable ‘news’ network that boasts Glenn Beck as one of their top stars was forced to cancel their planned holiday fear mongering opus “We Were Warned — Iran Goes Nuclear.”These are but a few examples of the hundreds if not thousands of the gigantic propaganda campaign to demonize Iran in preparation for the attack at the behest of that parasitic police state, but I digress….

From Mc Clatchy’s story Israeli officials reject U.S. findings on Iran Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (who Bush leaked the NIE to two days prior to it’s release) whined that:

“Even after this report, the American stance will still focus on preventing Iran from attaining nuclear capability,” Olmert said. “We will expend every effort along with our friends in the U.S. to prevent the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons.”

WE? Now this may cause me to be labelled as the boor at the party by some readers but isn’t it time to ask the obvious question: Just WHO is fucking dictating U.S. policy?

When the tail begins to wag the dog it then it is a cancer and cancer needs to be cut out or cut off – from funding that is. The United States gives away billions of taxpayer dollars per year with no strings attached in military aid to Israel to finance Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the bombing of civilians and there shouldn’t be another red fucking cent given to them until they get their asses to the peace table and get down to some good faith negotiations that could lead to the end of the slaughter. I can’t think of anything that I personally hate seeing my tax dollars (and I hate a lot of they ways that they are used to promote war and violence)spent on more than on than funding a militant foreign regime that represents and ongoing threat to world peace, is hell bent on using genocidal killing sprees to carve out Lebensraum and is armed to the teeth with hundreds of nukes. These weapons of mass destruction if and when push comes to shove could be unleashed in some lunatic plan called “The Samson Option” that is eerily reminiscent of General Jack D. Ripper’s maelstrom of madness in Dr. Strangelove where he locked down an Air Force base and sent the nuclear armed B-52’s on a renegade mission to nuke Russia. Those crazy fucking bastards in the extremist right wing circles of the Israeli government according to their Samson Option would actually unleash a massive final strike against the entire Arab population of the Middle East and as has become evident to anybody who can recognize stark raving mad fanaticism may even include Europe and quite possibly America. Hell, could anyone even put it past them that they could be using actual nuclear blackmail (as well as the long rumored sexual blackmail traps that have been ongoing) against the United States right now? How many of those Israeli nukes are targeted at American cities? It takes someone with one hell of a lot of chutzpah to come right out and publicly override the results of the entire U.S. intelligence community that has now emphatically gone on record as saying that Iran halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003. Just who in the fuck do these arrogant pricks think that they are – God’s chosen people or something?

Time for Israel to go it alone, it is neither cost effective nor in the long term interests of America to continue to play golem for a pack of hostile, illogical and indignant warmongers so let them for once go forth and fight their own battles. May they attack Natanz with the same vicious, no quarter savagery that they unleashed on the USS Liberty four decades ago and then let them deal with the blowback – it’s not our problem. Israel is like that freeloading drunken relative who insists on ‘blessing’ the family with his/her presence during the holidays and then proceeds to destroy everything that was planned by loving but naïve family members with good intentions and an ill placed sense of loyalty and tolerance towards a maladaptive idiot who fucks up everything on an annual basis and turns what should be a joyous time of peaceful enjoyment into a cross between National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And let them for once reap the whirlwind for their militarism and insanity as America renounces their unconscionable favoritism for Israeli extremists over Palestine and everyone else in the region. Time to reclaim the moral high ground by ousting the moral reprobates and their destructive ideologies and to act as an honest broker for peace. After the grand fucking that the world has been given by the criminal junta that seized power with an iron fist on 9/11 it is imperative that the war pigs be brought to heel once and for all and for the USA to cast off the garish costume of an empire of fear to once again become that shining city on the hill. Maybe like other rogue states Israel can just be threatened to be carpet bombed back to the Stone Age, kind of along the lines of what they tried to do to Beirut last summer – now THAT would level the playing field against their neighbors and their mutual festering centuries old religious hatred, let them all fight it out with sticks and fucking stones just like in the good old days.

The hard liners are still determined to have their goddamned war and suck the U.S. into it so to put it as Winston Wolf so eloquently once said “Well, let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks quite yet” because dark forces are scrambling to regain the iniative, the NIE is a brief reprieve that only buys a bit of time to further damage the doomsday machine. The American neocons and their right-wing whacko Israeli cohorts will now redouble their efforts to avenge this embarassing poke in the eye and barring the long overdue total explosion of Dick Cheney’s black heart the full force of the shadow government will be thrown behind a desperation fourth down all out blitz. The pocket media will be brought to heel, the public will be relentlessly bludgeoned into a near catatonic state of fear and the entire fucking playbook will be emptied to regain the initiative for their escalation of the war of civilizations. The Republican presidential candidates for 2008 (with the exception of Ron Paul) will also jack up their already bombastic rhetoric to the next level. Look for the next ‘debate’ to be a testosterone fueled, muscle flexing, Muslim bashing, torture drenched infomercial for Armageddon that will at worst provide the heretofore fractioning knuckle dragging lumpen Republican base with a unifying cause to let slip the dogs of war (not to mention the allure of a crusade against the she devil Rodham-Clinton) and at best will induce mass madness as the lunatic fringe take to the streets with blood curdling shrieks to launch a series of pogroms against liberals, pacifists and the usual scapegoats for their pathetic fucked up lives.

In any sane country the legislature, the courts and those still loyal and sane within the military command structure would be compelled to launch an immediate decapitation strike against an administration that has reached the end of the river and immediately arrest and frog march both George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney out of the White House and leg irons, restore control of the war machine to rational forces and weed out the moles, party hacks and fanatics before we are all in concentration camps sucking in nuclear fallout because that is the endgame to all of this lunacy for anyone not salivating over their seat assignment for the Rapture. This however is post 9/11 America and we only have the Vichy Democrats as a toilet tissue paper thin firewall against fullblown fascism and World War III. As for our elected officials now is the time to stop worrying about who was videotaped with someone’s dick, fist or rubber dildo in their mouth, asshole, vagina (or elsewhere) or whatever other unspeakable acts of debauchery and sodomy may be being held over their heads like the proverbial Sword of Damocles, or even if it is something as trivial of common corruption (hell, we expect that of politicians) it’s time to come clean in the best interests of America and reject the threats of The Lobby, people are catching on and pretty soon there will be far greater worries than appeasement of foreign agents – like trials for treason. As Pat Buchanan once correctly put it Congress is Israeli occupied territory and it’s way past time that a thorough housecleaning is done so those who are sworn to defend the Constitution start putting America first because all of the rest of it is just rot and corruption and runs counter to our own national interests.

I am sure that this post could potentially land me on Jane Harman’s shitlist as well as a place in a database for the day that the treacherous little fucking rat Lieberman consummates the anti-American H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 and commences the traveling carnival of perversion of McCarthyist modern day ‘red baiting’ and blacklisting but just fuck them all nonetheless.

All I want for Christmas is to wake up from this fucking long-running nightmare.

Our Lemming State

Here is yet another outstanding column by Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com that dares to call it like it truly is. The Neocon/Israeli joint-venture of hi-jacking America to act as a golem for the ultra-violent right-wing brutality of the bloodthirsty Zionist lunatics who continue to support Israeli agression despite it’s disastrous effects on American foreign policy and the bodies of our young who continue to get fed into the meatgrinder while traitors like Lieberman, McCain, Hillary and the rest of the bought and paid for whores of the Israeli Lobby thow out their rotator cuffs turning the crank for.

Best is that he goes after shithead fifth columnist Charles Krauthammer who if there was any justice in this pathetic shell of the land of the free and the home of the brave would have his head on a pike along Pennsylvania Ave along with the rest of the neocon, Bush-Cheney junta traitors.

Here is the link.

Neocons To Iraq: Screw You!

To paraphrase Colonel Frank Slade on the festering nest of dual loyalist, neocon fascsist snakes that is the American Enterprise Institute – Somebody should take a flamethrowner to that place.

AEI: A Roiling Spring Of Fascist Filth

That fetid nest of fifth columnist neo-fascists otherwise known as The American Enterprise Institute is at it again. The extremist reich-wing think tank has opened another front in their total war on America in the aftermath of a damning report by an international group of scientists that global warming is indeed a catastrophic reality. According to a piece posted at over at Common Dreams the AEI is throwing around wads of cash and casting a net for amoral shills willing to debunk the scientists. Not surprising since it also was reported this week that the Bush administration has engaged in a concerted campaign to censor the research of government agencies and environmental scientists that would interfere with the extreme pro-corporate, anti-science worldview of the rapacious looters of Wall Street and the winged monkey Rapture death cult. And it was of course all subsidized by American taxpayers.

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN’s panel as “resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work” and ask for essays that “thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs”.

The multi-faceted AEI attack machine has proven that it is far more versatile than only engaging in a single minded, relentlessly deranged neocon-Likudnik joint venture for raining down fire from the skies over Tehran in going after the IPCC as well. As a deadly multi-headed hydra with massive clout within the innermost power centers of the Bushreich one needs only to take a look at some of the names associated with this incubator of global fascism and world domination to get an idea on what a menace to democracy that it is. The AEI sports one hell of a roster of extremist right-wing freaks here are a few of the more well known who are listed as Scholars and Fellows:

Newt Gingrich: The egotistical, oversexed, philandering fascist dwarf with designs on the presidency has slimed out of this spider hole in recent months to denounce the First Amendment, engage in fear mongering and fomenting fascist sentiment. There are even some reich wingers out there with a Draft Newt movement – that’s the best damned idea that I have ever heard, give him a gun and ship his fat ass off to Iraq because after all, it is their war.

Lynne Cheney: Mrs. Dick is a key player for the AEI and has devoted much time to the cause between writing steamy lesbian pulp fiction novels and mounting McCarthyist campaigns along with that conniving little dual loyalist rat Joe Lieberman to purge ‘unpatriotic’ professors from the nation’s college campuses along the lines of similar efforts by the insidious neo-Nazi troll David Horowitz. It’s conventional wisdom that ‘shooter’ is a dangerous extremist but when looking a bit more closely at his ‘better half’ it’s becoming obvious who really wears the pants in the House of Cheney.

David Frum: Former Bush speechwriter and propagandist responsible for that “Axis Of Evil” statement that has proven so troublesome. Collaborated with fellow neocon Richard Perle on the anti-Muslim manifesto An End To Evil that laid out the case for perpetual war in the Middle East with the ulterior motive to carve out more lebensraum for Israel.

Richard Perle: Nicknamed The Prince of Darkness, Perle is a major player as well as a prominently featured talking head with intimate ties to Israeli hardliners. Perle’s resume and connections speak for themselves as to his importance to the neocon revolutionaries. He once remarked that investigative reporter Seymour Hersh was “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.” Perle was also a key contributor to the notorious report advocating Israeli aggression: A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm that was adopted by then P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu and that largely mirrors the doctrine of the Bush-Cheney junta.

Frederick W. Kagan: The driving force behind ‘the surge’ strategy and a longtime uber hawk who moved in quickly to present the neocon alternative that would allow junior to tell Poppy and Jim Baker exactly where they could stick their Iraq Study Group report.
Irving Kristol: The ideological ‘father of neoconservatism’ and genetic father of the highly influential William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, FOX and now the right-leaning Time Magazine (hey, they put the horsefaced Ann Coulter on the cover awhile back too) and who was a co-founder along with Robert Kagan (Fred’s brother) of the Project for the New American Century.

Michael Ledeen: Arch neocon who very disturbingly was described as “Rove’s Brain” by Wayne Slater and James Moore in their book The Architect. Ledeen is a prolific writer of right-wing polemics and veteran spook once glowingly described by Ted Koppel: “Michael Ledeen is a “Renaissance man in the tradition of Machiavelli” and a driving force for a war with Iran. Leedeen is incidentally referred to by many as an admirer of the finer aspects of Italian fascism.

Joshua Muravchik: Neocon third stringer who recently wrote an op-ed piece that was actually published by a reputable mainstream newspaper (The Los Angeles Times) very subtly entitled Bomb Iran.

The American Enterprise Institute and its resident zealots, fanatics, haters and ideologues represent one of the greatest threats to world peace, democracy and the future survival of humanity on the planet. Yet it is allowed to operate with a façade of legitimacy with no scrutiny by the mainstream media, the political system and absolutely no accountability.
It serves as a Mecca for every warmongering politico with an axe to grind against traditional American values and constitutional democracy. Manchurian John McCain and that duplicitous little fiend Joe Lieberman laid out their case for escalation in a joint appearance in early January and the regulars are a veritable who’s who of American neocon thugs with an eye on taking down the republic.

It is purveyor of hatred, a destroyer of economies, an important component of the military industrial complex and an ally to foreign governments that pursue an agenda that is a threat to our own national security.

It is in darkness that cockroaches thrive and it is long past time to shine a light into this foul nest of festering anti-Americanism before we are all ultimately victims of all that is evil that is concocted within it’s walls.

Collateral Damage

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost it’s way

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

– The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter

If Mick Jagger and the boys had any balls left whatsoever they would have opened the garish free market capitalist travesty that was the Super Bowl XL halftime show with the roiling menace of their classic Gimme Shelter followed by Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man despite their pre-arranged set. Once the anal retentive fuck-sticks who run the heavily censored corporate media were able to scrape their jaws off of the control room floor would they have cut the power to the entire set? If a line like “you can make a dead man come” is too provocative for the childlike minds of the year’s biggest infomercial what would a triple barreled blast of pure sixties rebellion do? A nation obsessed with graphic details about fucking but adverse to any similar graphic details about dying ugly….especially when the dying occurs in an illegal foreign war of intervention that is far more complicated than the bunting draped patiotic horseshit that is now so ubiquitious at national sporting events and other hoohah that distracts the simple minded.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five he uses the books of a fictional science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout to insert social commentary into his overall story. One of ‘Trout’s’ tales addressed the strange contradictions of a society that will accept with open arms one who kills civilians with state sanction during wartime while ostracizing one for silly, superficial reasons:

The Gutless Wonder: This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Vonnegut of course was present at Dresden on the night that allied bombers laid waste to the ‘Florence of the Elbe’, a historic city as well as a non-military target with little or no air defense system that was packed with refugees and prisoners and was targeted by bombers that incinerated over one hundred thousand civilians. Vonnegut spoke of seeing the boiled bodies of schoolgirls floating in a water tower through his character Billy Pilgrim and also of being forced to dig through the wreckage in the aftermath to find “corpse mines” and described the odor of the bodies:

“They didn’t smell bad at first…but then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas”

He also spoke of a character, another soldier who died of the dry heaves from having to go down into a corpse mine and being overcome by the stench:

“He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up”

Dresden doesn’t get much mention when it comes to our nation’s war history, neither does the decimation of the Japanese homeland by bombing of civilian areas nor the bombing of Viet Nam nor the brown skinned dead in any other foreign imperialist adventure undertaken by the politicians and their wealthy backers who cash in on the destroyed lives and flesh of those who become victims so that they may live opulent lives of carefree exploitation. I do want to make the statement that in doing so I am differentiating between ‘combatants’ and what is deemed to be acceptable ‘collateral damage’ to those dropping their bombs or launching their shells and missiles from far away lest they actually have to bear witness to the devastation. ‘Trout’s’ Gutless Wonder is a perfect metaphor for the apathetic and cruel philistines who allow for the murder of innocents to take place in their name as long as it doesn’t intrude upon their pathetic and selfish little lives.

I want to at this time take an opportunity to recognize it here for the sake of the memory of the dead and perhaps the hope of the living that we can one day finally recognize war for the profitable, industrialized slaughter that it is by listing a few accounts:

“The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then – to my utter horror and amazement – I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.” (Margaret Freyer: Dresden Resident)

“The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. The baby cow elephant was lying in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up in the sky. She had suffered severe stomach injuries and could not move. A 90 cwt. cow elephant had been flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by some terrific blast wave, and stood there trembling. I had no choice but to leave these animals to their fate. I had known for one hour now that the most difficult task could ever bring was facing me. “Lehmann, we must get to the carnivores,” I called. We did what we had to do, but it broke my heart.” (Otto Sailer-Jackson: Dresden Zookeeper)

“We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we looked. Our 4th floor did not exist anymore. The broken remains of our house were burning. On the streets there were burning vehicles and carts with refugees, people, horses, all of them screaming and shouting in fear of death. I saw hurt women, children, old people searching a way through ruins and flames. We fled into another cellar overcrowded with injured and distraught men women and children shouting, crying and praying. No light except some electric torches. And then suddenly the second raid began. This shelter was hit too, and so we fled through cellar after cellar. Many, so many, desperate people came in from the streets. lt is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. lt became more and more difficult to breathe. lt was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mothers hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub”. (Lothar Metzger: Dresden Resident)

Among other things Vonnegut later wrote:

“You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

And of course he is correct, the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy and whether it was ultimately necessary against a broken enemy or was merely an opening gambit in the Cold War will be debated until the end of our days but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be interpreted by most as necessary steps to end a long, cruel and far too bloody war and to spare even more American casualites. I can even see the validity of this argument although I am not a convert but these were only two events, albeit massive in the systematic destruction and the breaking of the will of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Regarding the bombing of Japan an excellent resource would be Errol Morris’ fine film the Fog of War during which he interviews at length former Secretary of Defense and Viet Nam war architect Robert McNamara who was Rumsfeld before Rumsfield in his arrogance. The film while not depicting the slaughter on the ground offered a glimpse into the methodology of industrialized mass murder. General Curtis LeMay, McNamara’s superior and the commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command that devastated the Japanese Home Islands in the late days of the war plays a prominent part. In the film McNamara explains his role in the incendiary attack by chillingly reducing it to the banality of number crunching as to the potential casualty tally. LeMay, who was savagely lampooned in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as General Jack D. Ripper who kicks off nuclear Armageddon is featured in actual film clips that are among the most interesting parts of the movie.

In a precursor to modern corporate number crunching the bombing run efficiency was maximized to the point where stripped B-29s were sent in flying so low that they literally reeked of burning flesh, a good and short although militaristic account on LeMay and the bombing has been written by Victor Davis Hanson and entitled The Right Man, this piece is featured in the World War II compilation called No End Save Victory, a pretty good book of essays that you could likely pick up cheap online. The ruthless efficiency of the incendiary bombings even had LeMay himself to comment that “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”.

On the nights of March 9 & 10 in 1945 Tokyo was subjected to an incredible incendiary bombardment that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city, boiling asphalt and cooking flesh. Although the true number will never be known it is estimated that nearly 100,000 were killed, most incinerated and most civilians including women and children and the helpless elderly. The fire consumed the city structures that were mainly built out of wood and the heat according to Nicholas Von Hoffman as published in Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters” But this is always the way that it is in war isn’t it? General LeMay was correct, the victors are never the war criminals and never the terrorists, the infamy as well as the true costs of agrression are not ultimately paid by the warmongers but suffered by the poor bastards who just happen to live under the rule of rogue governments or those that otherwise fall into disfavor with the most powerful of nations.

The graphic examples of civilian ‘collateral damage’ aren’t something that the public want to see or know about, they like their wars sanitized, neat, convenient, and morally clear along the lines of a John Wayne movie or other simplistic celluloid trash. Americans are mostly ignorant and express indifference at the true suffering of war and are generally the most mindless and unenlightened citizens of the world’s most dangerous of empires. We as a society gorge ourselves on violent fantasy on television, in movies and in video games reveling in every beheading, rape, dismemberment, shooting, knifing, incinerating and bludgeoning as long as we can remain safely detached and free from ever having to consider the actual consequences of violence. This is hypocrisy, a society so conditioned to accept the abominable as long as it is a part of the great American myth of righteousness and destiny glorifies death but when that death is real, nobody wants the gory details of what is perpetrated in our name. The exception being the near masturbatory glee that the mutilated and widely displayed corpses of Uday and Qusay Hussein elicited from a voyeuristic public addicted to sensationalistic cheap thrills. The bullet riddled bodies of the sons of Saddam were constantly and graphically displayed in order to feed the bloodlust necessary for rabid and continued support of the war against the Islamic savages.

The outrage over the images was made all the more conspicuous by it’s absence.

A while back, after the early afterglow of ‘Shock and Awe” had subsided and when the truth was slowly starting to seep out that “mission accomplished” was just another two word phrase along the lines of bull shit and cluster fuck I read a letter to the editor in my local newspaper that had dared to display the gruesome hanging of the charred corpses of four ‘contractors’ who were killed by a mob in the Iraqi city of Fallujah which would go on to be severely punished later. Some ridiculously dumb bitch had the audacity to write expressing her “outrage” that she actually had to explain this to her children. Americans love their wars as long as they don’t actually have to see what is being done in their names. As for the four ‘contractors’ I have no mercy and nothing but contempt for them, they were mercenaries, nothing but parasites that move from host to host preying on human misery for both the thrill and the money that comes with it but that alas is lost on those who shelter their spoiled children from all but electronic video violence. I doubt that she bothered to dash off a similar protestation over the bloody display of the war trophies that were the sons of Saddam.

What is lost in translation was the fact that the government was contracting mercenaries to do the wet work for the military. It is obvious that they were targeted for a reason, quite possibly the torture or murder of friends or family members of the rioters during one of the death squad raids that are now common in Iraq. I find the ongoing use of these ‘contractors’ to be repugnant and abhorrent, not only are they far more highly paid than the actual members of the military but they operate independent of any sort of congressional oversight and bear no accountability for their actions. I have no sympathy for bastards like that who are cruel violence junkies and arrogant psychopaths more into it for the thrill of the kill than the actual money. Just think of how great that a heroin addict would find it if he could be paid for riding the dragon. The assemblage and widespread use of private armies by the Pentagon is a very foreboding thing and may prove to have extremely grave consequences to us at home if their existence becomes acceptable to the general public and future domestic operations are commenced. Blackwater, one of the top mercenary firms was providing ‘contractors’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and no doubt these paramilitary goons already have contingency contracts lined up in the event of a ‘terrorist’ attack on the homeland.

I am not merely being callous over the violent fate of the ‘contractors’ , I just have far more sympathy for the innocent victims. Victims such as the Hassan family whose seventeen members were packed into a 1974 Land Rover in the early days of the invasion and were driving toward their dream of democracy and freedom from the evil savagery of Saddam. Instead of democracy, this family (the grandfather was dressed in his finest garment, a pin striped suit to look American for the celebratory occasion of their deliverance) was slaughtered in an unimaginably horrific manner by a nervous American soldier at a checkpoint who panicked and unloaded a barrage of military ordnance into the oncoming vehicle. Eleven members of the family were destroyed, not just killed but destroyed…as a veteran you can appreciate the power of military weaponry. Lamea, the pregnant wife of Bakhat Hassan survived the attack that turned the vehicle into an abattoir in which she described as follows:

“I saw the heads of my two little girls come off, my girls — I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead.”

An army public relations officer stated that it was “A miscommunication with civilians” after which the surviving members of the family were offered monetary compensation for their loss. As Bob Dylan once sang “money doesn’t talk it swears” and the true obscenity in this tableau is that we as Americans are so ignorant of the culture of others and so empty in our very souls that anybody could possibly offer money as a remedy for this atrocity. Unfortunately things such as this don’t get much play in the American mainstream media, there is always a Michael Jackson, Laci Petersen, Tom and Katie, Bennifer or Kobe Bryant to exploit in order to save some pathetic cunt from having to explain the insanity and abhorrence that is a war being waged in her name to some pathetically spoiled child who is pampered and indulged on the now traditional journey to become a selfishly ignorant and obese adult in the land of plenty while the impoverished children of the third world are dying of starvation.

Fallujah would go on to perish for our sins, targeted for destruction by a series of brutal military operations to quell the insurgency and to avenge the deaths of the mercenaries and to wash the bitter taste of public humiliation from the mouths of war planners. In a series of sieges that reduced the city to rubble civilians as well as combatants were targeted, snipers targeted ambulances, access to the main hospital was blocked, hundreds of Iraqis were killed and the ‘collateral damage’ was significant. A foreign documentary entitled Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre was produced and showed that the U.S. military was using incendiary White Phosphorous in the assaults. The video is highly recommended although not for those without a strong stomach, the evidence is as brutal as the imagery of the burned bodies. Of course this would never be allowed to air in the homeland. The media downplays the truth that is the charnel house of Iraq, there is always a king’s crusade to glorify or a celebrity to worship or a lurid sex scandal to lasciviously salivate over. Just another day in the empire according to the corporate press of the ruling party.

For real journalism and truths about the bloody quagmire we must utilize foreign sources, a sick joke in a land where a free and unimpeded press is supposed to act as a vital check against the tyranny of madmen. Dahr Jamail is essential reading for those who seek to stay informed as is Robert Fisk whose brutal honesty would serve as a slap across the face were any domestic sources permitted to carry his columns on a regular basis. Were the corporate media to have any balls or the majority of the public have any brains this is what they would be reading:

So we are going to support the myth. As the headless bodies are found along the Tigris, as the mortuaries fill up, as the American dead grow far beyond 1,700 – and, let us remember, the Iraqi dead go into the tens of thousands – Europe and the rest of the world still support the American project. The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered. “He was bringing supper home for our family in Palestine Street but he never reached our home. Then we got a phone call saying we could have him back if we paid $50,000 [£27,500]. We didn’t have $50,000. So we sold part of our home and many of our things and we borrowed $15,000 and we paid over the money to a man in a car who was wearing a keffiyeh scarf round his head. “Then we got another phone call, telling us that Hassan was at the Saidiyeh police station. He was. He was blindfolded and gagged and he had two bullets in his head. They had taken our money and then they had killed him.” There is a wail of grief from the yard behind us where 50 people are waiting in the shade of the Baghdad mortuary wall. There are wooden coffins in the street, stacked against the wall, lying on the pavement.

The American public has neither the time nor the stomach to trouble themselves with vagaries as this and the absence of the widespread syndication of Fisk’s work is a testament to a nation of selfish, apathetic, timorous fools who are far more concerned with halitosis than the stench of burning and rotting corpses that is so commonplace in the wars fought in their name. The atrocities of course take place in any war, war is a horrible thing, not something of valor and honor but an exercise in sorrow, death, destruction and the piles of stinking corpses and shattered lives that are left in the aftermath, such is as it always has been and always will be in the future. A public too accustomed to the sanitized death and violence of their false little worlds of television and video games and never forced to confront the real thing.

And So It Goes…

The military industrial complex has a vested interest in hiding this from the general population and of perpetuating the myths through propaganda. Hiding behind impugning the patriotism of others and invoking empty sloganeering such as ‘support the troops’ is not only of the lowest form of morality but of the highest form of cowardice and in the case of those who turn their magnetic ribbon stickers sideways to represent the Jesus fish, hypocrisy and apostasy. A large number of Americans ignorantly spout the jingoist phrase “nuke them all” when referring to non-Caucasian, non-Christian countries, specifically those in the middle east. This only reinforces their stupidity and lack of knowledge of the true horrors of war borne by those whose only crime was in happening to be citizens of a regime deemed to be an enemy of the American state and therefore subject to the full wrath of the arsenal of democracy, an arsenal that will always be restocked by the merchants of death that are the defense contractors.

Our cultural priorities have become so fucked up, corrupted and polluted that a glimpse of a woman’s nipple shown on national television dominates all media coverage and elicits outrage while the illicit occupation in Iraq with women and children being blown apart into bloody bits in the name of the never ending and all encompassing ‘war on terror’ does not make it into the national psyche who are more interested in getting their next hit of vicarious celebrity living off of the electronic crack pipe. Our idiot king has alienated us from the rest of the world and the psychotic court jesters of his rogue administration only continue to conspire to lead us all down the path that will ultimately conclude with the destruction of the very ideals of a democratic society if not the lives of those not only here in America but throughout the world. The crack down on dissent is coming that much is certain, too many people are starting to become restless and beginning to ask questions for it not to.

The equilibrium of international relations has not only been upset by these fools and charlatans but sent off spinning into the depths of some bizarre parallel universe in which up is down, wrong is right, truth is ignorance and war is peace. We have begun the journey down the rabbit hole, let us hope that the rabbit hole does not eventually end up being a mass grave. We are now on the precipice of the new crusades, a war of civilizations and religions perpetuated by those both ignorant of history as well as world culture.

We are now playing for keeps.

Collateral Damage

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost it’s way

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

– The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter

If Mick Jagger and the boys had any balls left whatsoever they would have opened the garish free market capitalist travesty that was the Super Bowl XL halftime show with the roiling menace of their classic Gimme Shelter followed by Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man despite their pre-arranged set. Once the anal retentive fuck-sticks who run the heavily censored corporate media were able to scrape their jaws off of the control room floor would they have cut the power to the entire set? If a line like “you can make a dead man come” is too provocative for the childlike minds of the year’s biggest infomercial what would a triple barreled blast of pure sixties rebellion do? A nation obsessed with graphic details about fucking but adverse to any similar graphic details about dying ugly….especially when the dying occurs in an illegal foreign war of intervention that is far more complicated than the bunting draped patiotic horseshit that is now so ubiquitious at national sporting events and other hoohah that distracts the simple minded.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five he uses the books of a fictional science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout to insert social commentary into his overall story. One of ‘Trout’s’ tales addressed the strange contradictions of a society that will accept with open arms one who kills civilians with state sanction during wartime while ostracizing one for silly, superficial reasons:

The Gutless Wonder: This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Vonnegut of course was present at Dresden on the night that allied bombers laid waste to the ‘Florence of the Elbe’, a historic city as well as a non-military target with little or no air defense system that was packed with refugees and prisoners and was targeted by bombers that incinerated over one hundred thousand civilians. Vonnegut spoke of seeing the boiled bodies of schoolgirls floating in a water tower through his character Billy Pilgrim and also of being forced to dig through the wreckage in the aftermath to find “corpse mines” and described the odor of the bodies:

“They didn’t smell bad at first…but then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas”

He also spoke of a character, another soldier who died of the dry heaves from having to go down into a corpse mine and being overcome by the stench:

“He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up”

Dresden doesn’t get much mention when it comes to our nation’s war history, neither does the decimation of the Japanese homeland by bombing of civilian areas nor the bombing of Viet Nam nor the brown skinned dead in any other foreign imperialist adventure undertaken by the politicians and their wealthy backers who cash in on the destroyed lives and flesh of those who become victims so that they may live opulent lives of carefree exploitation. I do want to make the statement that in doing so I am differentiating between ‘combatants’ and what is deemed to be acceptable ‘collateral damage’ to those dropping their bombs or launching their shells and missiles from far away lest they actually have to bear witness to the devastation. ‘Trout’s’ Gutless Wonder is a perfect metaphor for the apathetic and cruel philistines who allow for the murder of innocents to take place in their name as long as it doesn’t intrude upon their pathetic and selfish little lives.

I want to at this time take an opportunity to recognize it here for the sake of the memory of the dead and perhaps the hope of the living that we can one day finally recognize war for the profitable, industrialized slaughter that it is by listing a few accounts:

“The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then – to my utter horror and amazement – I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.” (Margaret Freyer: Dresden Resident)

“The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. The baby cow elephant was lying in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up in the sky. She had suffered severe stomach injuries and could not move. A 90 cwt. cow elephant had been flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by some terrific blast wave, and stood there trembling. I had no choice but to leave these animals to their fate. I had known for one hour now that the most difficult task could ever bring was facing me. “Lehmann, we must get to the carnivores,” I called. We did what we had to do, but it broke my heart.” (Otto Sailer-Jackson: Dresden Zookeeper)

“We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we looked. Our 4th floor did not exist anymore. The broken remains of our house were burning. On the streets there were burning vehicles and carts with refugees, people, horses, all of them screaming and shouting in fear of death. I saw hurt women, children, old people searching a way through ruins and flames. We fled into another cellar overcrowded with injured and distraught men women and children shouting, crying and praying. No light except some electric torches. And then suddenly the second raid began. This shelter was hit too, and so we fled through cellar after cellar. Many, so many, desperate people came in from the streets. lt is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. lt became more and more difficult to breathe. lt was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mothers hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub”. (Lothar Metzger: Dresden Resident)

Among other things Vonnegut later wrote:

“You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

And of course he is correct, the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy and whether it was ultimately necessary against a broken enemy or was merely an opening gambit in the Cold War will be debated until the end of our days but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be interpreted by most as necessary steps to end a long, cruel and far too bloody war and to spare even more American casualites. I can even see the validity of this argument although I am not a convert but these were only two events, albeit massive in the systematic destruction and the breaking of the will of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Regarding the bombing of Japan an excellent resource would be Errol Morris’ fine film the Fog of War during which he interviews at length former Secretary of Defense and Viet Nam war architect Robert McNamara who was Rumsfeld before Rumsfield in his arrogance. The film while not depicting the slaughter on the ground offered a glimpse into the methodology of industrialized mass murder. General Curtis LeMay, McNamara’s superior and the commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command that devastated the Japanese Home Islands in the late days of the war plays a prominent part. In the film McNamara explains his role in the incendiary attack by chillingly reducing it to the banality of number crunching as to the potential casualty tally. LeMay, who was savagely lampooned in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as General Jack D. Ripper who kicks off nuclear Armageddon is featured in actual film clips that are among the most interesting parts of the movie.

In a precursor to modern corporate number crunching the bombing run efficiency was maximized to the point where stripped B-29s were sent in flying so low that they literally reeked of burning flesh, a good and short although militaristic account on LeMay and the bombing has been written by Victor Davis Hanson and entitled The Right Man, this piece is featured in the World War II compilation called No End Save Victory, a pretty good book of essays that you could likely pick up cheap online. The ruthless efficiency of the incendiary bombings even had LeMay himself to comment that “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”.

On the nights of March 9 & 10 in 1945 Tokyo was subjected to an incredible incendiary bombardment that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city, boiling asphalt and cooking flesh. Although the true number will never be known it is estimated that nearly 100,000 were killed, most incinerated and most civilians including women and children and the helpless elderly. The fire consumed the city structures that were mainly built out of wood and the heat according to Nicholas Von Hoffman as published in Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters” But this is always the way that it is in war isn’t it? General LeMay was correct, the victors are never the war criminals and never the terrorists, the infamy as well as the true costs of agrression are not ultimately paid by the warmongers but suffered by the poor bastards who just happen to live under the rule of rogue governments or those that otherwise fall into disfavor with the most powerful of nations.

The graphic examples of civilian ‘collateral damage’ aren’t something that the public want to see or know about, they like their wars sanitized, neat, convenient, and morally clear along the lines of a John Wayne movie or other simplistic celluloid trash. Americans are mostly ignorant and express indifference at the true suffering of war and are generally the most mindless and unenlightened citizens of the world’s most dangerous of empires. We as a society gorge ourselves on violent fantasy on television, in movies and in video games reveling in every beheading, rape, dismemberment, shooting, knifing, incinerating and bludgeoning as long as we can remain safely detached and free from ever having to consider the actual consequences of violence. This is hypocrisy, a society so conditioned to accept the abominable as long as it is a part of the great American myth of righteousness and destiny glorifies death but when that death is real, nobody wants the gory details of what is perpetrated in our name. The exception being the near masturbatory glee that the mutilated and widely displayed corpses of Uday and Qusay Hussein elicited from a voyeuristic public addicted to sensationalistic cheap thrills. The bullet riddled bodies of the sons of Saddam were constantly and graphically displayed in order to feed the bloodlust necessary for rabid and continued support of the war against the Islamic savages.

The outrage over the images was made all the more conspicuous by it’s absence.

A while back, after the early afterglow of ‘Shock and Awe” had subsided and when the truth was slowly starting to seep out that “mission accomplished” was just another two word phrase along the lines of bull shit and cluster fuck I read a letter to the editor in my local newspaper that had dared to display the gruesome hanging of the charred corpses of four ‘contractors’ who were killed by a mob in the Iraqi city of Fallujah which would go on to be severely punished later. Some ridiculously dumb bitch had the audacity to write expressing her “outrage” that she actually had to explain this to her children. Americans love their wars as long as they don’t actually have to see what is being done in their names. As for the four ‘contractors’ I have no mercy and nothing but contempt for them, they were mercenaries, nothing but parasites that move from host to host preying on human misery for both the thrill and the money that comes with it but that alas is lost on those who shelter their spoiled children from all but electronic video violence. I doubt that she bothered to dash off a similar protestation over the bloody display of the war trophies that were the sons of Saddam.

What is lost in translation was the fact that the government was contracting mercenaries to do the wet work for the military. It is obvious that they were targeted for a reason, quite possibly the torture or murder of friends or family members of the rioters during one of the death squad raids that are now common in Iraq. I find the ongoing use of these ‘contractors’ to be repugnant and abhorrent, not only are they far more highly paid than the actual members of the military but they operate independent of any sort of congressional oversight and bear no accountability for their actions. I have no sympathy for bastards like that who are cruel violence junkies and arrogant psychopaths more into it for the thrill of the kill than the actual money. Just think of how great that a heroin addict would find it if he could be paid for riding the dragon. The assemblage and widespread use of private armies by the Pentagon is a very foreboding thing and may prove to have extremely grave consequences to us at home if their existence becomes acceptable to the general public and future domestic operations are commenced. Blackwater, one of the top mercenary firms was providing ‘contractors’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and no doubt these paramilitary goons already have contingency contracts lined up in the event of a ‘terrorist’ attack on the homeland.

I am not merely being callous over the violent fate of the ‘contractors’ , I just have far more sympathy for the innocent victims. Victims such as the Hassan family whose seventeen members were packed into a 1974 Land Rover in the early days of the invasion and were driving toward their dream of democracy and freedom from the evil savagery of Saddam. Instead of democracy, this family (the grandfather was dressed in his finest garment, a pin striped suit to look American for the celebratory occasion of their deliverance) was slaughtered in an unimaginably horrific manner by a nervous American soldier at a checkpoint who panicked and unloaded a barrage of military ordnance into the oncoming vehicle. Eleven members of the family were destroyed, not just killed but destroyed…as a veteran you can appreciate the power of military weaponry. Lamea, the pregnant wife of Bakhat Hassan survived the attack that turned the vehicle into an abattoir in which she described as follows:

“I saw the heads of my two little girls come off, my girls — I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead.”

An army public relations officer stated that it was “A miscommunication with civilians” after which the surviving members of the family were offered monetary compensation for their loss. As Bob Dylan once sang “money doesn’t talk it swears” and the true obscenity in this tableau is that we as Americans are so ignorant of the culture of others and so empty in our very souls that anybody could possibly offer money as a remedy for this atrocity. Unfortunately things such as this don’t get much play in the American mainstream media, there is always a Michael Jackson, Laci Petersen, Tom and Katie, Bennifer or Kobe Bryant to exploit in order to save some pathetic cunt from having to explain the insanity and abhorrence that is a war being waged in her name to some pathetically spoiled child who is pampered and indulged on the now traditional journey to become a selfishly ignorant and obese adult in the land of plenty while the impoverished children of the third world are dying of starvation.

Fallujah would go on to perish for our sins, targeted for destruction by a series of brutal military operations to quell the insurgency and to avenge the deaths of the mercenaries and to wash the bitter taste of public humiliation from the mouths of war planners. In a series of sieges that reduced the city to rubble civilians as well as combatants were targeted, snipers targeted ambulances, access to the main hospital was blocked, hundreds of Iraqis were killed and the ‘collateral damage’ was significant. A foreign documentary entitled Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre was produced and showed that the U.S. military was using incendiary White Phosphorous in the assaults. The video is highly recommended although not for those without a strong stomach, the evidence is as brutal as the imagery of the burned bodies. Of course this would never be allowed to air in the homeland. The media downplays the truth that is the charnel house of Iraq, there is always a king’s crusade to glorify or a celebrity to worship or a lurid sex scandal to lasciviously salivate over. Just another day in the empire according to the corporate press of the ruling party.

For real journalism and truths about the bloody quagmire we must utilize foreign sources, a sick joke in a land where a free and unimpeded press is supposed to act as a vital check against the tyranny of madmen. Dahr Jamail is essential reading for those who seek to stay informed as is Robert Fisk whose brutal honesty would serve as a slap across the face were any domestic sources permitted to carry his columns on a regular basis. Were the corporate media to have any balls or the majority of the public have any brains this is what they would be reading:

So we are going to support the myth. As the headless bodies are found along the Tigris, as the mortuaries fill up, as the American dead grow far beyond 1,700 – and, let us remember, the Iraqi dead go into the tens of thousands – Europe and the rest of the world still support the American project. The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered. “He was bringing supper home for our family in Palestine Street but he never reached our home. Then we got a phone call saying we could have him back if we paid $50,000 [£27,500]. We didn’t have $50,000. So we sold part of our home and many of our things and we borrowed $15,000 and we paid over the money to a man in a car who was wearing a keffiyeh scarf round his head. “Then we got another phone call, telling us that Hassan was at the Saidiyeh police station. He was. He was blindfolded and gagged and he had two bullets in his head. They had taken our money and then they had killed him.” There is a wail of grief from the yard behind us where 50 people are waiting in the shade of the Baghdad mortuary wall. There are wooden coffins in the street, stacked against the wall, lying on the pavement.

The American public has neither the time nor the stomach to trouble themselves with vagaries as this and the absence of the widespread syndication of Fisk’s work is a testament to a nation of selfish, apathetic, timorous fools who are far more concerned with halitosis than the stench of burning and rotting corpses that is so commonplace in the wars fought in their name. The atrocities of course take place in any war, war is a horrible thing, not something of valor and honor but an exercise in sorrow, death, destruction and the piles of stinking corpses and shattered lives that are left in the aftermath, such is as it always has been and always will be in the future. A public too accustomed to the sanitized death and violence of their false little worlds of television and video games and never forced to confront the real thing.

And So It Goes…

The military industrial complex has a vested interest in hiding this from the general population and of perpetuating the myths through propaganda. Hiding behind impugning the patriotism of others and invoking empty sloganeering such as ‘support the troops’ is not only of the lowest form of morality but of the highest form of cowardice and in the case of those who turn their magnetic ribbon stickers sideways to represent the Jesus fish, hypocrisy and apostasy. A large number of Americans ignorantly spout the jingoist phrase “nuke them all” when referring to non-Caucasian, non-Christian countries, specifically those in the middle east. This only reinforces their stupidity and lack of knowledge of the true horrors of war borne by those whose only crime was in happening to be citizens of a regime deemed to be an enemy of the American state and therefore subject to the full wrath of the arsenal of democracy, an arsenal that will always be restocked by the merchants of death that are the defense contractors.

Our cultural priorities have become so fucked up, corrupted and polluted that a glimpse of a woman’s nipple shown on national television dominates all media coverage and elicits outrage while the illicit occupation in Iraq with women and children being blown apart into bloody bits in the name of the never ending and all encompassing ‘war on terror’ does not make it into the national psyche who are more interested in getting their next hit of vicarious celebrity living off of the electronic crack pipe. Our idiot king has alienated us from the rest of the world and the psychotic court jesters of his rogue administration only continue to conspire to lead us all down the path that will ultimately conclude with the destruction of the very ideals of a democratic society if not the lives of those not only here in America but throughout the world. The crack down on dissent is coming that much is certain, too many people are starting to become restless and beginning to ask questions for it not to.

The equilibrium of international relations has not only been upset by these fools and charlatans but sent off spinning into the depths of some bizarre parallel universe in which up is down, wrong is right, truth is ignorance and war is peace. We have begun the journey down the rabbit hole, let us hope that the rabbit hole does not eventually end up being a mass grave. We are now on the precipice of the new crusades, a war of civilizations and religions perpetuated by those both ignorant of history as well as world culture.

We are now playing for keeps.