Ms. Pumpkin Head for President: A Nightmare

By Edward Curtin

A few weeks ago I had a terrifying nightmare, so gruesome was it that I awoke screaming. In this dark horror show, I was carving a pumpkin for Halloween.  The cap came off easily and I disemboweled the slimy interior quickly, but as I did, I felt a strange sensation on my hand, as if a tongue were biting it. 

When I was finishing carving the face, however, the trouble really started.  The pumpkin head came alive as the eyes and mouth moved and then it started speaking in a voice that was familiar but one I couldn’t place.  Blond hair started sprouting from its head as it started shrieking and bouncing on the table in an hysterical manner.  I jumped back in fear and trembling as it started cackling, “I running, I running.” Blood ran from between the carved teeth and the blue eyes pulsated with the mania of a serial killer in a horror movie.

I awoke with a scream when I realized it was Hillary Clinton.

So hideous was this night terror that I kept it to myself. But a week later when the next Democratic pseudo-debate was being promoted, I said to my wife that something told me that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee and the debates were a sideshow.  She said she thought that would never happen and that Clinton was now hated and done for. I disagreed without recounting my nightmare because to describe it at that point would have induced more retching at the thought of the night monster.

Then this past week during the Democratic debate, the courageous Tulsi Gabbard put the lie to the murderous militarism of U.S. foreign policy and its regime change operations with its use of American supported terrorists in Syria and throughout the world.  She calmly and eloquently denounced the militarist positions of the other candidates standing beside her, as they listened disquieted and disturbed to a patriotic American speaking truth that they dare not even think, so bought and sold are they.

She was a woman alone among a cast of sycophants denouncing the murderous policies carried out by presidents Democratic and Republican and foisted on the American people through a vast network of propaganda, appealing to their worst instincts.  It was a stunning few minutes, for it is so rare, almost unheard of, for a politician to tell Americans the brutal truth about their government.

To many it was a sign of hope, but to the evil forces that run this country, Rep. Gabbard had gone too far and the knives came out in force, this time led by the pumpkin-headed Hillary Clinton and her accomplices at The New York Times and The Washington Post, who have consistently trashed Tulsi Gabbard in an effort to destroy her candidacy.

I felt my dream was prophetic when Clinton, in her slimy manner, attacked Tulsi Gabbard, without naming her, by saying,

I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve [The Russians] got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.

Well, I ain’t making any prediction either; I’m leaving that up to my nightmare to do my talking.

It tells me that Hillary-O-Lantern, spitting blood, is running and gunning again.

She’s the favorite of the CIA and the military industrial complex and all those who profit from war and live off the deaths of victims everywhere.  They have bunches of sites and bots and fake news conspirators and all sorts of ways of supporting her, which they have been doing for many years, straight through their constructed Russia-gate and Ukraine-gate conspiracies and her barbaric support for wars everywhere, including the destruction of Libya and her joyful response to the fiendish death of Muammar Gaddafi, among so may atrocities.

Tulsi, never cowered, said it straight and true in response:

Great, Thank you.  You the Queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and  of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.

It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.

She later said, “I stand against everything she represents.”

Halloween is the time for masks and dissembling. Hillary Clinton is a figure straight out of a grotesque Halloween party, as are her clones in the Democratic party. Tulsi Gabbard was not invited to their party but came anyway, and came to tell the truth about the masquerade.

She has torn off Clinton’s mask and asks the American people to see the true face of Clinton and all her minions, who represent the triumph of war and death, and the sick play we have been living through, an endless war on terror justified by endless lies.

Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set:

Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabreor war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.

Lying is the leading cause of living death in the United States.

Tulsi Gabbard has told the truth.

Like me, I am sure you don’t want your nightmares to become reality. Let’s live in the truth.

*Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Leaked Hillary Clinton memo killed half a million people

A memo leaked by Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton makes the case to arm terrorists in Syria and was largely overlooked due to inaccurate dates, says Daniel Lazare, the author of “The Frozen Republic: How the (US) Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy”, in his investigative article for Consortium News, titled: “Leaked Hillary Clinton memo killed half a million people”.

Now we have more details about the story:

A Hillary Clinton memo that Wikileaks made public in 2016 has not gotten the attention it deserves. It takes us back to 2012 and the early phase of the Syrian war.

At that point, it was largely an internal affair, although Saudi arms shipments were playing a greater and greater role in bolstering rebel forces. But once the Obama administration decided in favor of intervention, the conflict was quickly internationalized as thousands of terrorists – styling themselves – holy warriors flooded in from as far away as western China.

The 1,200-word memo by then-Secretary of State Clinton begins with the subject of Iran, an important patron of Syria.

She dismisses any notion that nuclear talks will stop Iran “from improving the capability to enrich uranium.” In such a case, she says Israel will suffer a strategic setback since it will no longer be able to “respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today.” Denied the ability to bomb at will, Israel might leave off secondary targets and strike at the main enemy instead.

Consequently, Clinton argues that the US should topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria so as to weaken Iran and allay the fears of Israel, which has long regarded the Islamic republic as its primary enemy.

As the memo puts it: “Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted.”

This document making the case to arm Syrian rebels may have been largely overlooked because of the dates, which appear to be inaccurate.

One line gives the time as “2001-01-01 03:00” even though Clinton was still a New York senator-elect at that point. That date is also out of synch with the timeline of nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

Another contains a State Department case and document number and a date of Nov. 30, 2015.  But that’s incorrect as well since it postdates Clinton’s resignation as secretary of state by better than two and a half years.

Consequently, anyone stumbling across the memo in the Wikileaks archives would have no idea of how its rather loopy logic figures in the great debate about whether to use force to bring down Syrian President Assad. But textual clues provide an answer.

The second paragraph refers to nuclear talks with Iran “that began in Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May,” events that took place in 2012. The sixth invokes an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour conducted with then-Israeli War Minister Ehud Barak “last week.”

Since the interview took place on April 19, 2012, the memo can, therefore, be dated to the fourth week in April. This is shortly before Clinton joined forces with then-CIA Director David Petraeus to push for an aggressive program of rebel military aid.

Needless to say, Clinton’s skepticism about negotiating with Iran proved to be unwarranted since Iran eventually agreed to downgrade its nuclear program.

The memo thus illustrates her hawkishness along with her conviction that Israeli security trumps all other considerations even if it means setting fire to a region that’s been burned over more than once.

But the memo illustrates much else besides: Clinton’s recklessness, her lack of realism and her almost mystical belief that everything will fall neatly into place once the United States flexes its muscle. Overthrowing Assad would be nothing less than “transformative.”

She writes: “Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East. The resulting regime in Syria will see the United States as a friend, not an enemy. Washington would gain substantial recognition as fighting for the people in the Arab world, not the corrupt regimes. For Israel, the rationale for a bolt from the blue attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be eased. And a new Syrian regime might well be open to early action on the frozen peace talks with Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsor since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles.”

Hillary Clinton further writes: “It was ‘a low-cost high-payoff approach’, that would eliminate one enemy, weaken two more, and generate such joy among ordinary Syrians that peace talks between Damascus and Tel Aviv will spring back to life.”

The risks were nil. Since “the Libyan operation had no long-lasting consequences for the region,” the memo says, referring to the overthrow of strongman Mu’ammar Qadhafi six months earlier, the Syrian operation wouldn’t either.

She writes: “Some argue that U.S. involvement risks a wider war with Russia. But the Kosovo example [in which NATO bombed Russian-ally Serbia] shows otherwise. In that case, Russia had genuine ethnic and political ties to the Serbs, which don’t exist between Russia and Syria, and even then Russia did little more than complain. Russian officials have already acknowledged they won’t stand in the way if intervention comes.”

So, there was nothing to worry about. Sixty-five years of Arab-Israeli conflict would fall by the wayside while Russia remains safely marginalized.

Needless to say, that’s not how things turned out. At that moment, Libya seemed under control. But three or four months later, it would explode as Western-backed militias blasted away at one another, imposing weird barbaric rules in the name of Sharia, re-instituting slavery and rolling back decades of social progress. Once President Barack Obama approved a modified version of the Clinton-Petraeus plan, Syria would plunge into the same abyss as Salafists funded by Saudi Arabia and the other oil monarchies spread sectarian violence and fear.

Clinton’s assumption that the US could neatly and cleanly decapitate the Syrian government without having to worry about broader consequences was little short of deluded.

The notion that ordinary Syrians would fall to their knees in gratitude was ludicrous while her disregard for the intricacies of Syrian politics was astonishing.

Then there’s the memo’s blithe suggestion that Washington “work with regional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to organize, train, and arm Syrian rebel forces.”

In late 2009, Clinton wrote in another diplomatic memo made public by Wikileaks that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” So what made her think two years later that Riyadh would not fund Syrian takfiris of precisely the same ilk?

The 2009 memo slammed Qatar for allowing al-Qa’eda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups to use the sheikdom “as a fundraising locale.”

So what made Hillary Clinton think that a pro-al-Qaeeda autocracy would now help Syrians “fight for their freedom,” as the memo puts it?  Wouldn’t Qatar be more likely to remove what little freedom Syrians had left? Of course, it would.

There is remarkable continuity between the Syria policy that Clinton was proposing and earlier policies in Afghanistan and Libya.  In the first, US military aid wound up flowing to the notorious warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a sectarian and raging anti-western xenophobe who nonetheless was “the most efficient at killing Soviets,” as Steve Coll put it in “Ghost Wars,” his bestselling 2004 account of the CIA’s love affair with Afghan mujahideen.

Hekmatyar’s cutthroats wound up with the lion’s share of American arms. More or less the same thing happened in Libya once Clinton persuaded Qatar to join the anti-Qadhafi coalition. The sheikhdom seized the opportunity to distribute some $400 million to various rebel militias, many of them takfiri terrorists. The Obama administration said nothing in response.

Once again, US arms and materiel flowed to the most reactionary elements. The same would happen in Syria where US and Saudi arms went to the local al-Qa’eda affiliate, known as Jabhat an-Nusra, and even to Daesh, as a meticulous report by Conflict Armament Research, a Swiss and EU-funded study group in London, has shown.

By August 2012, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency report found that Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qa’eda were already “the major forces driving the insurgency” and that the US and Persian Gulf states backed them regardless.

Speechwriter Ben Rhodes summed up the problem of “moderate” rebels who were indistinguishable from al-Qa’eda in his White House memoir, “The World As It Is.” In that, he writes that “an-Nusra was probably the strongest fighting force within the opposition, and while there were extremist elements in the group, it was also clear that the more moderate opposition was fighting side by side with an- Nusra. I argued that labeling al Nusra as terrorists would alienate the same people we want to help while giving an-Nusra less incentive to avoid extremist affiliations.”

The problem was how to separate the “good” al-Qa’eda fighters from the “bad.”  The cost, half a dozen years after the Clinton email, is staggering. As many as 560,000 people have died, half the population has been displaced, while the World Bank has estimated total war damage at $226 billion, roughly six years’ income for every Syrian man, woman, and child. A cockeyed memo thus unleashed a real-life catastrophe that refuses to go away.  It’s a nightmare from which President Donald Trump is struggling to escape in his confused and deluded way and that the Deep State – everyone from arch-neocon John Bolton to “liberal” Nancy Pelosi– is determined to renew.

I’m Arab and Many of Us Are Glad That Trump Won

By Omar Kamel

It’s not that we see Trump any differently. Trump is an egotistical racist misogynist who, in a rational world, shouldn’t be in any position of power. Then again, neither should Hillary Clinton. We watched from afar (as ‘afar’ as the internet allows anyhow) as the 2016 presidential campaign rolled on, and, at first, we wanted Bernie Sanders to win, and were very glad to see just how much support he managed to get, but then, Bernie did two Very Bad Things; he said he was okay with Obama’s Blacklist and his usage of drone strikes, and he said that he’d support Clinton if he didn’t get the nomination. Some people held on to Bernie, but for many of us, for me, that was it. Bernie might still have claimed to be ‘better’, but he certainly couldn’t claim to be ‘good’. We also watched the political establishment ignore Bernie and shove Clinton ahead of the self described ‘socialist’. We watched as even people like John Oliver and the entire cast of Saturday Night Live attacked Trump viciously and tried to pave the way to a Clinton victory. Oliver even took it upon himself to attack and ridicule minor candidates like Stein & Johnson, but not Clinton. We watched as so-called liberals and so-called democrats made Clinton out to be a hero. We watched as all those people bent over backwards and pretended that Clinton was one of the good guys because they felt compelled to pick between the ‘lesser of two evils’. It was pathetic. There’s a bit of fatalism involved here, to be sure, and a deep level of cynicism. Many of us feel that if America could not choose the best option, then it deserved the worst. Also, there’s a harsh desire for rough truth, rather than hypocritical garnish. In a sense, many Americans are Trump, but most of them like to think of themselves as closer in character to who Clinton (falsely) claims to be; liberal, democratic, leftist, humane, charitable, kind. There are some who faced the facts honestly, and admitted that, for all intents and purposes, Clinton was a criminal and a manipulator who plays ball with the worst human rights offenders on the planet (Saudi Arabia and Israel, for example) and relies on their financial and political support. They understood that when promising to continue Obama’s legacy, Clinton is in fact promising to kill another 4,000 innocent Pakistanis by drone strikes in an illegal attempt to murder untried ‘terrorists’. They understand that this is a woman for whom Madeline Albright is a role model, and Kissinger is an icon, a woman who started out Republican before swapping sides and acting as though she were a Democrat, most likely because she realized that, as a woman, she could go farther as a Democrat. This is a liar who claims to have been dodging sniper fire in a foreign land when she was being greeted with flowers. Throughout the campaign, Clinton supporters have turned a blind eye to her failings. Somehow they were more horrified by what Trump may do than what Clinton already has done. So yeah, we weren’t very excited about a Clinton victory. Nothing would change. America would continue to think itself a progressive democracy that voted in first a black man, and then a woman. The demon would continue to wear a passable face, remain…presentable. We do not think Trump is any better, but we think a Trump victory would force the USA to admit to what it has become, and would allow other countries around the world to react appropriately now that the cover has been blown. JFK put on a good mask but behind the mask he was a lying adulterer who lifted the weapons embargo on Israel, allowing the US to supply it with the weapons used against Palestinians. The so-called ‘Special Relationship’ between the USA and Israel began with JFK. His smile and charm, however, make people, even in the Arab world, look back on him with fondness. Bill Clinton was the same, all charm and smiles while he signed off on the use of military force against Americans on American soil (in Waco), and pushed the Palestinians through Oslo, and then later, in his impeachment hearings, pretended the word ‘is’ was ambiguous. The Bill Clinton I remember was an arrogant liar and a murderer, not a charming man at all. The latest in this series of supposed good guys is Obama, proudly black, but closer to what Malcolm X referred to as a ‘house nigger’. Obama did not stop the war machine, and did not close down Guantanamo. Drone usage during Obama’s time has gone up exponentially, but…he performs beautifully; he cries when school shootings take place, he laughs at himself with an anger translating sketch, he dances and raps to your pleasure, he seems cool and laid back, a great dad, a fun guy. To tens of thousands of Pakistanis though, Obama is nothing but a cold blooded murderer. To Egyptians he is just another in a long line of US presidents who support a military dictatorship, supplying it with money and weapons. To people in Yemen (the poorest Arab country), he is the man who has helped supply Saudi Arabia (ostensibly the most fascist country on Earth) with more than $100 billion in weapons with which they have destroyed Yemen. To millions of people around the world he is a bomb that happens to have a smile painted on it. And now, finally, rather than suffer the pretense of progress under a female president, America has voted for Trump. Good. Lay bare the racism, lay bare the arrogance, lay bare the lies and the brutalities. Face yourselves, see yourselves, and then maybe, maybe, things will change…