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Edited on Sat Jun-23-07 05:24 PM by Peace Patriot
history professor who were both just wetting their pants about the idea that Clinton's takeout of the pharmaceutical company in Sudan was a "preemptive strike" just like Junior did on Iraq. C-span radio, yesterday.
I could hardly believe my ears (a common condition today) at the lack of perspective, the lack of scale. The whole show was about how the Democrats did it, too, all the way back to JFK and Northwood--only they DIDN'T SAY that JFK NIXED Northwood (CIA plan to bomb a civilian airline and blame it on Cuba), and they also discussed the Bay of Pigs (CIA/Miami mafia invasion of Cuba) and DIDN'T SAY that JFK NIXED THAT, TOO. I kept waiting for the next sentence ("But, of course, JFK nixed those crazy, murderous schemes..."). It never came. They let it sit out there that these schemes occurred with a Democrat as president, with the implication that because he was president, he approved them. He did not. He stopped them. And probably got a magic bullet in the head because of it.
Now I am the last person to launder CIA or Democratic Party leadership perfidy. It is not a pretty story. And you might say that the worst of it, carnage for carnage, was LBJ's war on Vietnam, which began as a CIA scheme under Eisenhower to create a US puppet government called "South Vietnam" to prevent the real government--the one that would have won UN-sponsored elections hands down (if the US had permitted elections to occur)--the Ho Chi Minh government in Hanoi--from unifying Vietnam. This was another mess that the CIA dumped on JFK, the CIA being an extremely dangerous and powerful secret rightwing club, sitting right at the heart of our government, like a poisonous snake. JFK and RFK both hated the CIA, and tried to curtail them and bring them under civilian control. Just before he died, JFK signed executive orders to begin WITHDRAWAL of US military "advisers" from Vietnam, and I am firmly convinced, if he had lived, would have cut that war plan off before it escalated to the levels of 1964 (a year later) that made the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident so easy to fabricate (LBJ's excuse for full scale war). RFK then took up that legacy in 1968, and was trying to stop that much bigger and horrible war, when he, too, met with a bullet.
But both LBJ and his VP, Humphrey (who won the Democratic Party nomination by default, in 1968, and almost beat Nixon, but was, in reality, no better than Nixon on the war) bought into this whole CIA paradigm of fomenting war, assassinating leaders and destroying democracy or genuine peoples' revolutions in third world countries, in the interest of US multinationals and the US "military-industrial complex." It has rarely been otherwise with our party leadership, with the exceptions of JFK (to some extent) and the transformed RFK in 1968, McGovern in 1972 (candidate), and Jimmy Carter (president for one term--who tried to change CIA culture in South America, and ultimately created the Carter Center, which has done tremendously important work on transparent elections in South America). The Democratic Party has been a very mixed bag. In the face of Reagan's illegal war on Nicaragua, they held hearings and slapped some wrists, but failed to impeach Reagan for it--which they had the numbers in Congress to do, and should have done--and Reagan's collusion in the even worse slaughter in Guatemala occurred entirely under the radar, and continuing operations like the School of the Americas (torture training for South American fascists) and the horrors in El Salvador and other places have all occurred with the silent collusion of the Democratic Party leadership.
Which brings me to Clinton. It is true that Clinton struck an innocent pharmaceutical company in Sudan, either a mistake or conscious punishment of Sudan for harboring Osama bin Laden, or even as some kind of payoff to the US pharmaceutical industry. I have no illusions about Clinton, who furthermore helped soften up Iraq for Bush Jr.'s full scale invasion. But to say that ANYTHING Clinton did is anywhere near the scale of horror and sheer evil, as the actions of the Bush terrorist gang, is a mind-boggling distortion of the kind that Lewis Carroll was mocking in "Through the Looking Glass" ("Alice in Wonderland") and George Orwell fictionalized in "1984." It is "the Big Lie."
From JFK to Clinton, there has been an on-going struggle within the soul of the Democratic Party, between the jobs and other political grease of a highly (since WW II) militarized US economy, and the true good of the people--peace and justice. You can see JFK trying, against this strong tide of entrenched militarization, to bend it toward peaceful goals, in the space program and the moon shots. He saw that as a sort of "beating swords into plowshares." Yes, it derived from the military, and was a semi-military operation, but it was run by a bunch of semi-anarchistic, libertarian engineers, many of whom were science fiction addicts (great dreamers) as children. It had an idealistic, peaceful ambience. (Beat the Soviets with better engineering, with moon walks and space travel, not with nukes.)
And this inner struggle between militarism and peacefulness, within the Democratic Party, has gone up and down over the decades since WW II. Clinton tried to turn the "military-industrial complex" toward "free trade" (global corporate piracy), a very, very mistaken policy, but nevertheless an effort to accomplish PEACEFULLY (and somewhat lawfully) what the CIA used to do for US industry by assassinating leftist leaders and installing military dictatorships. And, while "free trade" violated principles of democracy and fairness--and has resulted in a slow death by impoverishment for millions--it nevertheless left room for democratic, leftist rebellion in many countries, which is exactly what is happening in South America now. There is a substantial difference between financial corruption and throwing leftists out of airplanes, or into mass graves, and torturing and 'disappearing' thousands, which poisons and paralyzes a country's political culture, and takes decades to recover from. Argentina is a good example. "Free trade"/World Bank policies turned Argentina into a basketcase, but the moment they freed themselves from it, with Venezuela's help, boom!, recovery has been swift--a matter of a few years.
Clinton's was an essentially peaceful and lawful presidency (if you stretch the word lawfulness to cover NAFTA et al). (In any case, the FORMS of law have been observed--a not unimportant principle.) The Bush Junta, on the other hand, is the most unlawful, criminal, and destructive regime the world has seen since Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. It is unprecedented in American history. Its assertions of the right to torture, the right to detain prisoners without charge, to writing their own laws, to massively spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant, to veil their budgets in secrecy, to veil everything they do in secrecy, their frontal assault on the Constitution, their massive thievery and war profiteering, and their turning post-Vietnam U.S. war policy on its head, and mounting a full scale war, with absolutely no justification, are NATION-KILLING. They are appalling.
And it is this reality that the C-Span sycophant and the history professor were trying to fuzz over, in asserting that it was actually Clinton who pioneered the Bush Junta's "preemptive strike" policy. A missile strike is one thing. A war in which half a million people are slaughtered, in the initial bombing alone, is quite another.
I have rarely heard anything so twisted, and so clever as to disinformation techniques. And I would guess that it was part of a coordinated effort to downplay Bushite crimes, of which this release of historical CIA papers is another element.
Again, I have no illusions about our party leaders. I think they have actively colluded with Bush, to push the national narrative (that great corporate delusion) toward fascism, so that their "free trade" corruption looks progressive. And I trust them in the Middle East about as much as LBJ and Nixon should have been trusted in Southeast Asia. (Not. At. All.) Further, their betrayal of us on rightwing Bushite electronic voting corporations counting all our votes with "trade secret" code badly needs a reckoning. What shites they have been! Truly. But leaders who have been trapped, bullied or corrupted into bad policy are significantly different from this fascist Bushite cabal that has seized our government, shredded our Constitution and hijacked the U.S. military for a corporate resource war. It may be difficult and stomach-churning to defend the Democrats, but we really must try to do so in the face of a lie like this: That Clinton's one-time missile strike on Sudan is the same as the Iraq War.
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Just an added note, in answer to an issue raised upthread: What is this new disclosure of old CIA material intended to cover up, smother, fuzz over, deflect?
Some possibilities are:
1) that the torture, rendition, secret prisons and other such outrages have had nothing to do with "keeping us safe" and everything to do with the Bush Cartel eliminating evidence and witnesses to their other crimes (money trail to Al Qaeda? arms dealings?), for business purposes, or offing potential honest leaders of their people in Iran/Afghanistan, and that wholesale arrests and torture of innocents was just cover for these nefarious purposes.
2) the real reason for the Plame/Brewster-Jennings outings (possibly coverup of a scheme to plant WMDs in Iraq, as part 2 of the Niger/Iran nuke forgeries scam, an underbelly of 'Plamegate' that might also have involved the murder of the Brits' WMD expert David Kelly).
3) who the Bushites were spying on (Kerry campaign? Dean campaign? Wellstone? Leahy? Cleland?--and numerous other possibilities, including pervasive spying on Congress critters for blackmail or setup purposes, and a case that I am intrigued by, the former CA Sec of State Kevin Shelley, who sued Diebold just before the 2004 (s)election, and was soon "swift-boated" out of office on entirely bogus corruption charges; the possibilities are endless for abuse of spying and black ops, with this criminal crew.
4) the content of Rove's RNC emails (as to the theft of the 2004 election, and possibly also 'Plamegate').
5) the content of Cheney's "missing" papers for 2003 and beyond (juicy possibilities, with 'Plamegate' maybe the least of them).
6) the flights of the Saudis/bin Ladens out of the country, after 9/11 (recent disclosure of FBI memo that suggests that Osama may have paid for the flights).
7) recent disclosure that Cheney does not consider himself to be part of the Executive Branch (--connected to Patrick Fitzgerald's frequent mention of the VP office's central role in 'Plamegate,' in Libby trial docs?).
8) the real reason for Rumsfeld's removal (given that there has been no change of policy in Iraq)--his OSP was the operational end of 'Plamegate' (attempt to plant the weapons in Iraq, foiled by somebody in the B/J network, possibly David Kelly), and Cheney/Libby were just the political end of that operation?
9) money, an abiding factor in all things Bushite (--just the things that we can see are so corrupt as to be almost unbelievable).
10) role of Blackwater, Titan, CACCI and Halliburton mercenaries in Iraq and other places (creating terrorist incidents, killing inconvenient US agents (Nicholas Berg?), torture, fomenting civil war, BEING Al Qaeda in Iraq, etc.)
11) links between the Bush Junta and the death squads in Colombia.
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