Black Holes in Benghazi

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Matt

Far be it from me to stand up and defend Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton.  But the Republican attempt to embroil his administration in a ‘cover-up’ over the killing of four Americans, including the US ambassador,  in Benghazi last September says a great deal about the intellectual and moral vortex into which American politics has descended.

Obama has just released 100 e-mails containing ‘talking points’ with the administration in the aftermath of last year’s attacks, in order to refute Republican accusations of a cover-up.   What does this ‘cover- up’ consist of?   According to the Republicans,  the administration presented last year’s attack as  an ad hoc protest against the Islamophobic ‘Innocence of Muslims’ video,  rather than the work of  a terrorist organization, in order to deflect criticisms that might have affected Obama’s election chances.

There may well be some truth in these allegations, a) because the idea that some bunch of guys simply happen to show up outside the US embassy on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks and open fire with an RPG simply because they feel angry about a video is not entirely credible, and b) the administration may well have been reluctant to accept that the attack on the Benghazi embassy was a pre-planned ‘terrorist’ attack.

But such reluctance is not the same thing as a ‘cover-up’ – and even if it was it pales into insignificance in comparison with some of the mountain of sleaze that Republican governments have built up over decades.

Nevertheless the Republicans are clearly determined to use Benghazi, just as they once used Monica Lewinsky’s dress and the Starr Inquiry, to compensate for the fact they have currently made themselves unelectable.

Leading Republicans, including House Speaker John Boehner and Karl Rove are using the Benghazi ‘cover-up’ not just to attack Obama and US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, but also to discredit Hilary Clinton, in what appears to be a pre-emptive move to disrupt her presidential chances, should she choose to run in the next election.

The result is a carnival of lies, stupidity and sheer bad faith.   Take Dick Cheney, that shining beacon of truth and probity, accusing the administration of  having ‘ ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the threat. They ignored messages from their own people on the ground that they needed more security.’

Cheney even has the gall to suggest that Obama should have scrambled fighter jets or unleashed special forces in response to the Benghazi attack, just like the Bush administration, because, according to the former Veep ‘ In my past experience when we got into these situations — especially after 9/11 — we were always on the step, locked and loaded, ready to go on 9/11.’

The dishonesty of that statement is so gross that I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry, so I think I’ll just let out a strangled croak instead.   Or better still, move on to  Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post, shaking his semantic maracas,  accusing Obama of playing down the significance of the Benghazi attack, by describing it as ‘ act of terror’ rather than an ‘act of terrorism’.

Whooo, come on and feel the nuance.   Ok, maybe don’t bother, because this really won’t take you very far in any direction.   And hey, isn’t that John Bolton, the mustachioed troglodyte who has hardly even seen  an Arab country that he didn’t want to blast to smithereens, shuffling his tail out there at the back of the procession?   It is indeed he, telling Newsmax  – a webzine that makes Fox News look like The Guardian that

‘The failure of the administration eight months after the attack either to retaliate, to avenge the killing, to exact retribution, to make it clear to the terrorists you can’t do this and get away with it, is much more serious….It tells terrorists, you can attack Americans with impunity, and that’s very dangerous.’

Who would Bolton like to ‘retaliate’ against, given that the people who attacked the Benghazi embassy were in fact de facto allies of the United States and the EU during the overthrow of Gaddafi?   The Great Avenger doesn’t say.

There is clearly not much point in bombing Libya – already done that.   Or Mali -  the French have got it covered.   At least Israel is bombing Syria – something that will undoubtedly warm Bolton’s heart.   And in Bolton-land, it’s almost certain that Iran had something to do with Benghazi, and even if it didn’t, it’s still probably worth unleashing some shock n’ awe just to keep the Persians in place.

Nowhere in this scandal-in-a-teacup, is there the slightest acknowledgement either by the Democrats or the Republicans that what took place in Benghazi is a direct consequence of a fraudulent ‘humanitarian’ intervention to ‘ prevent a massacre’ (in Benghazi) and overthrow a dictator that has effectively ripped to pieces yet another Arab society – while simultaneously opening new spaces for al-Qaeda-like Salafist formations to spring up like poisonous mushrooms.

There is a debate to be had there, which could also address the question of why the same process is being repeated in Syria.   But these aren’t debates that either the Democrats or the Republicans are interested in having, because all the latter really want to do is ditch Obama and they don’t care what it takes.

And their efforts will always bear fruit in the land of McCain, Limbaugh and Beck.  Thus  a Public Polling Policy poll has found that 55 percent of ‘very conservative’ respondents and 41 percent of Republicans believe that Benghazi is the ‘biggest political scandal in American history’.

Which only proves that conservatives know nothing about American history, and that the Republican party has become a black hole in which  truth, rationality and honesty simply vanish – never to be seen again.

Posted in Terrorism, US politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Rings of the Gove

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Matt

Even amongst the reactionary gargoyles in Lord Snooty’s cabinet, Michael Gove is truly a piece of work.   Ever since he wrote his banal neocon screed Celsius 7/7, Gove has presented himself – and unfortunately been accepted in certain circles – as some kind of deep thinker.

The New Statesman loves him for his charm and intellectual ability, which is surprising and somewhat alarming to me at least, since Gove really comes over as an unctuous, shallow reactionary without the shred of an original idea.

This is the man who told Mail readers back in March of his one-man crusade against  the academic Marxist hordes and ‘enemies of promise’ who have kept the nation’s disadvantaged youth in ideological shackles for decades.

In it Gove declared that

Survey after survey has revealed disturbing historical ignorance, with one teenager in five believing Winston Churchill was a fictional character while 58 per cent think Sherlock Holmes was real.

According to Gove, this ignorance was due in part to the kind of academics who had signed a petition criticizing his over-proscriptive national curriculum, since

You would expect such people to value learning, revere knowledge and dedicate themselves to fighting ignorance.  Sadly, they seem more interested in valuing Marxism, revering jargon and fighting excellence.

Goodness, what absolute blackguards, you can hear Mail readers thinking.  What’s the country coming to?

This drivel was accompanied by a photograph of Marx himself, the greatest enemy of promise in human history, a man who – unlike Gove and the Mail -  did not value knowledge, facts or empirical thinking and dedicated his life to making people more ignorant.

But now, thanks to the intrepid efforts of  retired teacher Janet Downs, it turns out that our great educational crusader wasn’t so rigorous after all, and that his ruminations on the ignorance of British children were based on a survey carried out by, ahem, UK Gold on the impact of British fiction, and another by Premier Inn.

In other words,  the savior of British education is either lazy, shallow or dishonest, or a perhaps a combination of all three,  and has about as much academic rigor as Kerry Katona.  Or Ian Duncan Smith, who was reprimanded by the UK Statistics Authority for quoting made-up figures suggesting that his benefits cap was getting more people back to work,  that were ‘unsupported by the official statistics published by the department’.

But then, why shouldn’t a reactionary zealot fake statistics or look to UK Gold or Premier Inn to back up his arguments?  Gove, like Duncan-Smith,  knows what he believes, and what he believes, he knows, and he also knows where to find the information to support what he knows.

After all, we are dealing with a man who wants the nation’s children ‘ to acquire the stock of knowledge required to take their place in a modern democracy’.   Who could argue with that?   And we should be grateful that the Education Secretary has given us all such a sterling lesson in how to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Education | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Twilight of the General

Posted on May 11, 2013 by Matt

Guatemala is not a country that has had much to celebrate in the last half a century.  In 1954, a US-backed coup overthrew the centre-left government of Jacobo Arbenz, and ushered in a thirty year ‘war’ – or rather a reign of terror – in which some 200,000 people were killed, mostly by the army and security services.

So it’s a rare bright spot in the country’s history that the courts have been able to send Rios Montt down for 80 years for genocide and crimes against humanity.  I remember the general  very well, from when I lived in New York during the early Reagan years.

It was a period in which the US  finally ditched Carter’s tepid human rights policy and began providing financial aid and military assistance to military regimes across Central America in order to turn back the revolutionary tide that was sweeping through the region.    In Guatemala, the military was effectively given carte blanche to do whatever it wanted under Reagan, after a period in which the Carter administration had restricted military aid in an attempt to reign one of the most brutal regimes on the continent.

The Guatemalan army was steeped in the counterinsurgency doctrines emanating from the School of the Americas and other US military institutions from the Kennedy years onwards, and it was often so violent that it even appalled the Imperium’s diplomats from time to time.

Under Lucas Garcia and then Rios Montt, the military slaughtered people in their tens of thousands – mostly, but not exclusively Mayan Indians who the country’s Ladino elite regarded as subhuman primitives whenever they tried to assert their civil or labor rights.

In the army’s eyes, anyone who engaged in such activity was a  ‘subversive’, and real or potential supporter of the various leftwing guerrilla organizations that had emerged since the Arbenz coup – and a subversive had to be killed.

In Guatemala, as in El Salvador, in those days, a ‘subversive’ might be  a trade unionist, a teacher who worked with the poor, a peasant activist, or a human rights activist.   Or someone who happened to live in an area of guerrilla activity, like the 250 inhabitants of the village of Dos Erres, in Peten province, which was completely wiped out in 1982, on Rios Montt’s watch, by the Guatemalan army’s elite Kaibil unit, following a guerrilla ambush in the vicinity.

They included the teacher and all the children in the local school, some of whom were photographed here shortly before the massacre:

These children were among the 18,000 people who were recorded as killed or ‘disappeared’ in Guatemala that year at the hands of the army, secret services and paramilitary death squads.   Many of them were savagely tortured before they died to enhance the level of psychological terror that was always implicit in these operations.

The army – and its American backers – described this savage campaign of state killing  ‘counter-terror’, and received political, military and logistical support from the United States, Israel, and South Africa, among others.

All this went into overdrive during the Reagan years, and while it was going on, Rios Montt, an evangelical Christian, liked to appear on national tv in which he delivered little homilies to Guatemalans on their moral standards and the evils of divorce.

This vicious clown was the man who Ronald Reagan once praised for his ‘great personal integrity’ and his commitment to democracy.  Some years later I went to a service by Montt’s American-based church ‘El Verbo’ – The Word, in Guatemala, where I heard some moron preaching about the evils of lesbianism and homosexuality in Guatemala.

El Verbo, like many of the evangelical churches in Guatemala, worked closely with the army in the same areas where it had carried out some of the worst massacres, providing food and ‘spiritual guidance’ to the traumatized survivors.  It was chilling and disgusting to witness it.

I never met Montt.   The old bastard was out  of power then, but no one imagined that he or any other Guatemalan army officer would ever end up in court.

That was in the early 90s, and even then, the army was a law unto itself,  and was still capable of killing anyone who tried to draw attention to what it had done in the past, such as the anthropologist Myrna Mack, who was murdered because of her investigations into army massacres in the Mayan highlands in the 1980.

But cracks in the edifice of impunity were beginning to appear, and Rios Montt is the most high-profile case to date.   It is far too premature to herald a new dawn for Guatemala – the current president was one of Montt’s officers, who himself has been accused of involvement in the massacres of the 1980s.

Nevertheless, many Guatemalans have reason to celebrate, not least the survivors of Montt’s crimes, some of whom sang in court when the verdict was delivered.  Because sending an 86-year-old man to 80 years may be objectively meaningless as an individual punishment, but in Guatemala it is a massive achievement that,  hopefully, opens up the possibility of better days to come.

 

Posted in State terrorism, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Real Queen’s Speech

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Matt

My Lords and Members of Parliament,  my government’s legislative programme will focus more than ever before on the victimization of migrants, as a useful distraction from the immense damage it has inflicted on British society since 2010.

In order to stop hordes of Bulgarian and Rumanian criminals and parasites from overwhelming our green and pleasant land, my government will seek to deny hospital treatment and health care to all migrants.   My ministers will also seek to prevent migrants from accessing social housing, even though very few migrants actually do this.

My government will also be hand out Abu Qatada dolls to every household in the country so that ordinary hardworking striving Britons will be able to stick pins into them.

My government will continue to terrify the public with visions of the strange bearded foreigners who want to destroy our way of life and take away our freedoms.

My government will  seek new powers to deport them to the strange and alien lands they come from, by abrogating the un-British Human Rights Act that the Johnny Foreigners who run the European Union have foisted on the nation.

My government will cease the archaic and redundant practice of dedicating 0.7 percent of the budget to small and faraway countries of which we know nothing and whose problems are due entirely to the corruption of the natives.   Instead my Government will dedicate the same percentage of the budget to overseas military operations and to the promotion of British business interests abroad.

My government will continue to act as a salesman for British Aerospace and sell weaponry to the Gulf autocracies, in order to prepare for the coming war with Iran. My government will deploy military missions in the Gulf States and also in Somalia, in order to prevent ‘terrorism and mass migration.’

My government will build a huge fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, which as the learned scribe David Aaronovitch recently pointed out, are an ‘ethical and effective’ way of eliminating our enemies, even if we do not know who our enemies are.

My government will continue to seek new enemies and new wars abroad wherever possible,  because Britain is a warrior nation and cannot be allowed to become like Belgium or Denmark.

My government will continue to ride shotgun with our great ally the United States, and do and say whatever it is told to do, so that Britain can continue to ‘punch above its weight.’

My ministers will continue to force the sick and disabled to work, even if they die looking for it, because work makes people virtuous and a great nation does not have its curtains drawn at nine in the morning.

My government will continue to torment the workshy unemployed by turning the benefit system into an impenetrable and punitive obstacle course, so that they either take up the temporary or zero hours contracts that are becoming the norm, or fall out of the system altogether.

My government will encourage banks and entrepreneurs to invest in our beautiful country by offering generous tax breaks.  My ministers will continue to blunder on  with brutal austerity measures that have come under serious criticism even from the IMF, and which have produced nothing but stagnation, falling living standards and the pauperisation of large swatches of the population.

My government is conscious of the surging numbers of people using food banks, the rising numbers of hungry children in the nation’s classrooms, and the growing numbers of families who cannot pay their energy or food bills.

My ministers will  therefore continue to support the activities of the Trussell Trust and other food bank charities, while mindful of the possibility that such activities might provide a business opportunities for G4S and Serco.

My government will continue to accelerate the destruction of the post-World War II social contract.   So far twenty percent of the local council budgets has been cut, and my ministers will seek to increase this percentage, even though experts are warning that the entire care system for the elderly is on the point of collapse.

My government will address this problem by cutting or abolishing pensions and obliging pensioners to work until they drop, thereby helping them to realise their full potential that was previously denied to them by the welfare state.

My government will also seek to use the advances of modern science to bring dead people back to life and add zombie labour to the workforce, in order to relieve the burden on state budgets, prevent EU immigration,  and help reduce the deficit.

My government will cut ‘red tape’ for employers and make it easier for them to hire and fire employees.

My government will continue to transform public services into a source of profit for its favoured companies and corporations,  whether it is rubbish collection, the probation service, schools, or the NHS.

My Education Secretary will devise a national curriculum in the nation’s schools designed to churn out a generation of automatons, in order to defeat the Marxist academics and ‘enemies of promise’ who have seriously undermined the ability of the nation’s youth to participate in the Great Race with Singapore and Hong Kong.

My government will abolish school holidays and introduce military drill for toddlers, because discipline is next to godliness and the devil makes work for idle hands.

My government will make every day like Christmas.   My government will lead the nation to a bright and prosperous future.   My government will make Britain great again, a country of strivers working together for the common good.

My government will deliver candy floss and ice cream to every household and teach pigs how to fly – or teach the population how to see them.

Other measures will be laid before you.

My Lords and members of the House of Commons, I pray that the blessing of almighty God may rest upon your counsels.

Posted in UK politics | Tagged | 4 Comments