More on NC's role in CIA torture

From an email from NC Commission of Inquiry on Torture:

Report Findings

After 18 months of investigation and research, including two days of public hearings last year, the Commission’s report reveals that:

• The role of Aero Contractors, based at the public Johnston County Airport in Smithfield, was larger than previously understood - during the first, developmental phase of the CIA’s global “black site” or secret prison system, from September 2001 to March 2004, Aero flew over 80% of all identified CIA renditions.

• Rendition was not just transportation to torture – it was an essential part of the CIA’s torture process.  The goal of rendition was to “dehumanize” the individual before interrogation.  The violent nature of renditions themselves, which have never been investigated by a U.S. government entity, amounted to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

• Neglect by North Carolina and Johnston County officials of their duty to investigate credible information on crimes committed using their airports, effectively has made them sponsors of illegal and immoral activity.

• The use of torture has immense costs for our country in national security and intelligence gathering. It undermines the rule of law and erodes our ability to be moral leaders.  Impunity for government torture has negatively shaped public attitudes toward Muslims and made our society more cruel. Torture has stained Johnston County, North Carolina, and our nation. 

NC's role in CIA torture program

From an email from NC Commission of Inquiry on Torture:

The North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture 

October 2018

"Citizens’ report shines light on NC role in CIA torture program"

In a powerful column in North Carolina’s News & Observer newspaper, editor Ned Barnett praises the “persistent and uncompromising” North Carolina citizen effort to bring transparency to the CIA torture program. “When the government wouldn’t take action to address its own offenses,” Barnett writes, “these citizens formed their own 10-member investigative panel, the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture.”

The release of the Commission’s ground-breaking report, Torture Flights: North Carolina’s Role in the CIA Rendition and Torture Program, analyzes the ways in which North Carolina was used as a launching pad for torture. It describes the complicity of public officials and the role of private contractors, most notably Aero Contractors, headquartered at the Johnston County Airport.

Under the heading “Grim Account,” Barnett quotes from the report:  “Aero transported at least 49 individuals, who were forcibly seized without any due process, in a manner that itself amounted to torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Preparation for ‘rendition’ involved physical and sometimes sexual assault, drugging, and sensory deprivation. Rendition flights were experiences of prolonged pain, dread, and terror.”

Barnett says Johnston County District Attorney Susan Doyle should investigate whether Aero’s activities violated state law.  He calls on State Attorney General Josh Stein and Governor Roy Cooper to “explore the need for a state investigation.” And he criticizes Senator Burr's failure to release the full Senate Intelligence “torture report” as "contrary to what best serves the nation.” 

Voting for the Lesser Evil

Top Public Health Threat

Health Professionals Tackle War

By David Swanson

When I discovered that militarism is one of the top destroyers of the natural environment, I piled that onto my case against war. I did the same when I found out war wasted more money than anything else, was a major promoter of bigotry and racism, was the primary justification for government secrecy and the erosion of civil liberties, was the top barrier to the rule of law and global cooperation, militarized local police, etc., etc. When I came to see how counterproductive war was, increasing the dangers of war for those whose governments wage or prepare to wage wars, I added that to the overwhelming case.

In contrast, when I read about militarism as a top public health threat, a top cause of death and disease, a “completely preventable” epidemic which medical professionals therefore have a responsibility to try to prevent, I’m struck with conflicting responses. First, this is actually why I opposed war in the first place. Second, it’s a bit shocking and wonderful to read doctors, writing like doctors, treating war as a health crisis, almost as if we lived in a sane society in which problems were prioritized for rational reasons.

After all, our culture actively promotes war to little children, just as it does junk food and consumerism.

Preventing War and Promoting Peace: A Guide for Health Professionals is a valuable new book edited by William Wiist and Shelley White. The book is a collection of writings by health professionals and peace professionals. It begins with a section of chapters covering the damage that war does to civilians, to participants, to the natural environment.

Part II looks into causes of war, including war culture, war profiteering, and war academia. Parts III and IV address means of preventing war and promoting peace, and of doing so in the health professions. 

The rest of the article is here.

David Swanson on Korea

Korea Should Reunify Outside the Empire

By David Swanson

The majority of dictatorships on planet earth — by the U.S. government’s designation of which countries are dictatorships — are sold U.S. weapons. And most of their militaries are trained by the U.S. military.

If I had to pick a dictatorship to object to the U.S. government’s position on, it would be one of these many, and probably it would be Saudi Arabia. But, then, I’m not a Progressive Senator. If I were, then I would object to anything less than complete hostility toward a country that the U.S. has not armed or trained in war, but rather sits on the edge of going to war against — a country that the U.S. president not long ago threatened to drop nuclear bombs on.

Imagine if the United States made peace with North Korea. There are perhaps three ways to do it.

1. The United States deals directly with North Korea and transforms it into another weapons customer, thereby facilitating U.S. weapons sales on both sides of the demilitarized zone. Nobody in Korea is likely to stand for this.

2. The United States allows Korea to reunify, but keeps all the weaponry and troops in Korea that it now has in the South (as required by current U.S. law) and adds some more weaponry and troops to the northern part of the unified country. This will require at least a few days of telling the U.S. public that the only defense against the evil Chinese or Russians is a well-armed unified Korea. That’s perfectly doable.

3. The United States allows Korea to reunify, disarm, and promote peace in the world. This would be something new under the sun. It’s what the people of Korea need and struggle for. The resulting firestorm in the U.S. media would be 10 times worse than Russiagate. Trump would be denounced in exactly the terms he ought to be denounced in for his actual offenses.

For possibility #3 to prevail, millions of people in the United States who are smart enough to oppose lots of horrible things Trump has done would have to strain their brains and find somewhere within them the capacity to make Trump aware that he will receive tons of praise if he does a good thing.

The rest of the article is here.

Wars Kill Children

Photo taken by me at Mother's Day Rally in Asheville 2018. Sign and display by Ellie. 

Article form Consortium News

The New York Times as Judge and Jury

Seeking to maintain its credibility, The New York Times dispenses with the criminal justice system and basic principles of journalism to weigh in again on Russia-gate,

By Joe Lauria

We've seen it before: a newspaper and individual reporters get a story horribly wrong but instead of correcting it they double down to protect their reputations and credibility-which is all journalists have to go on-and the public suffers.

Sometimes this maneuver can contribute to a massive loss of life. The most egregious example was the reporting in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Like nearly all Establishment media, The New York Times got the story of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction-the major casus belli for the invasion-dead wrong. But the Times, like the others, continued publishing stories without challenging their sources in authority, mostly unnamed, who were pushing for war.

The result was a disastrous intervention that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and continued instability in Iraq, including the formation of the Islamic State.

In a massive Times' article published on Thursday, entitled, "'A Plot to Subvert an Election: Unravelling the Russia Story So Far," it seems that reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti have succumbed to the same thinking that doubled down on Iraq.

They claim to have a "mountain of evidence" but what they offer would be invisible on the Great Plains.

With the mid-terms looming and Special Counsel Robert Mueller unable to so far come up with any proof of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to steal the 2016 election-the central Russia-gate charge-the Times does it for him, regurgitating a Russia-gate Round-Up of every unsubstantiated allegation that has been made-deceptively presented as though it's all been proven.

This is a reaffirmation of the faith, a recitation of what the Russia-gate faithful want to believe is true. But mere repetition will not make it so.

The Times' unsteady conviction is summed up in this paragraph, which the paper itself then contradicts only a few paragraphs later:

"What we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.”

But this schizoid approach leads to the admission that "no public evidence has emerged showing that [Trump's] campaign conspired with Russia."

The Times also adds: "There is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved.”

This is an extraordinary statement. If it cannot be "proved or disproved" what is the point of this entire exercise: of the Mueller probe, the House and Senate investigations and even of this very New York Times article?

Attempting to prove this constructed story without proof is the very point of this piece.

The rest of the article is here.

Quote from Helen Keller

“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.” —Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La Follette, 1924)

From World Beyond War

“Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.” 

― Eleanor Roosevelt

Giving Resistance a Good Name

Giving Resistance a Good Name

By David Swanson

It’s popular to refer to the political line of a major corporate party in the United States as something like “the resistance” when the other of the two parties is on the throne of what both parties have, over many decades, actively converted into an unconstitutional position of something wildly beyond old-fashioned royal powers. Around 2004 the Democratic Party line was to pretend to oppose wars. Around 2018 it wasn’t. So the “resistance” of that party’s followers included war opposition in 2004 but not in 2018. Its essence was and is not resistance at all, but obedience.

When it comes to the general habit of resisting unproven, unworthy, illegitimate, and unpopular authority, the stance promoted by U.S. culture is quite mixed, and virtually everyone in the U.S. government is opposed to resistance as a matter of principle or as a matter of cowardice. For every whistleblower, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people who could have exposed the very same abuses and chose not to.

Bruce Levine believes that the anti-authoritarian personality type is beaten down and drugged out of people by U.S. culture, and that we suffer in the United States from excessive apathy and obedience because the activists we need have been diagnosed as ill, drugged into submission, conditioned by schooling, tamed by rewards, hounded out of academe and respectability, imprisoned, and chased out of the country or exiled. Add those factors to long working hours, lack of economic security and healthcare, student debt loads, tons of television viewing, obsessive consumerism, social isolation, bootstraps bullshit, and the mythology that holds that submissive loyalty to the U.S. flag equals a brave stance for liberty, and you’ve got a population primed to put up with more shit than probably any other on earth — and, perhaps not coincidentally, the country producing the most violent destruction around the world and, by some measures — and per capita by virtually every measure — the most destruction of the earth’s environment.

The rest of the article is here.

Trump's Opposition

Trump’s “Opposition” Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsense

by Caitlin Johnstone

A new article from the Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lied to congress about the measures Saudi Arabia is taking to minimize the civilian casualties in its catastrophic war on Yemen, and that he did so in order to secure two billion dollars for war profiteers.

This is about as depraved as anything you could possibly imagine. US-made bombs have been conclusively tied to civilian deaths in a war which has caused the single worst humanitarian crisis on earth, a crisis which sees scores of Yemeni children dying every single day and has placed five million children at risk of death by starvation in a nation where families are now eating leaves to survive.  CIA veteran Bruce Riedel once said that “if the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow, because the Royal Saudi Airforce cannot operate without American and British support.” Nobody other than war plutocrats benefits from the US assisting Saudi Arabia in its monstrous crimes against humanity, and yet Pompeo chose to override his own expert advisors on the matter for fear of hurting the income of those very war plutocrats.

If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be.

It would be so very, very easy for Democratic party leaders and Democrat-aligned media to hurt this administration at the highest level and cause irreparable political damage based on this story. All they'd have to do is give it the same blanket coverage they've given the stories about Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort which end up leading nowhere remotely near impeachment or proof of collusion with the Russian government. The footage of the starving children is right there, ready to be aired to pluck at the heart strings of rank-and-file Americans day after day until Republicans have lost all hope of victory in the midterms and in 2020; all they'd have to do is use it. But they don't. And they won’t.

The rest of the article is here.

Stop the Killing in Afghanistan

Stop Killing and Dying in Afghanistan: Now More Than Ever

By David Swanson

The Richmond (Va.) Times Dispatch recently published an editorial, republished by other papers with the headline: “Remembering why we still fight in Afghanistan.” It’s a rather striking piece of writing, because it does not even attempt to offer a single reason why anyone would “fight” in Afghanistan. The headline, however, suggests that someone is still waging war there because of something they’ve forgotten and can be reminded of. Given that the top killer of U.S. troops who have participated in that war has been suicide, one is tempted to shout “Get on with the reminding already!” But then one has to wonder: reminding of what?

The first few paragraphs of the editorial simply tell us that 17 years have gone by. 

Then we come to this:

“There are still about 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.”

In fact, the U.S. military now has approximately 11,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, plus 4,000 more that Trump sent plus 7,148 other NATO troops, 1,000 mercenaries, and another 26,000 contractors (of whom about 8,000 are from the United States). That’s 48,000 people engaged in a foreign occupation of a country 17 years after the accomplishment of their stated mission to overthrow the Taliban government.

Next in the editorial comes this:

“Most Americans, however, have little idea what we’re doing there. Many Americans probably do not even realize that there are still Americans deployed there.”

So “we” are both there and unaware of being there, or there and unaware of why. That’s quite a feat for “we.” Imagine rewriting those sentences in ordinary factual language:

Most people in the United States have heard no convincing reason why the U.S. military is in Afghanistan, and many don’t even know it is there.

When you say it like that, so that I am not somehow magically there myself, I feel more open to urging the U.S. military — an entity that exists separately from me — to get out of there.

The editorial continues:

“The Virginia War Memorial hopes to change that. For 20 years, the memorial has produced a series of short documentary films called ‘Virginians at War’ to preserve history and educate future generations. On September 11 this year, the memorial released its newest film, ‘A New Century, A New War,’ focusing on the terrorist attacks and the ensuing wars. The documentary was created in response to requests from Virginia teachers searching for tools to introduce the difficult and important subjects of 9/11 and our long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

If you look up “the Virginia War Memorial,” you find an institution promoting such initiatives as “Little Soldier Saturdays” with pro-war activities for children aged 3-8. But you don’t find any explanation of why wars in general or the war on Afghanistan in particular are justified. Nor have they made their film available; so no readers of this editorial are able to watch it, and the editorial does not convey any explanation of the war that might be found in the film. Instead, the Times Dispatch tells us:

“Twenty interviews were conducted with Virginia veterans and with family members of those lost in the Pentagon attack. From these interviews, a moving and informative film was created that presents vivid memories from 9/11 and shows the personal costs of the wars. ‘A New Century, A New War,’ was created to show how the world changed in one day and how Virginians have lived and served in this new environment. Clay Mountcastle, director of the War Memorial, explains: ‘We wanted a film that would convey the full spectrum of feelings surrounding 9/11, and the weeks and months after, to those too young to have experienced it themselves. We also tried to capture the complex nature of serving in a prolonged war with several lessons and meanings.’ The War Memorial hopes the film will remind Virginians about this critical chapter in history and provide an invaluable reference tool for classrooms. ‘A New Century, A New War’ will soon be available for viewing at the Virginia War Memorial and distributed to teachers across the state. Go see it. It’s well worth the visit and the viewing.”

And that’s it. So, one is left simply to assume that because “9/11” happened, war on Afghanistan is justified until the end of times or until Jesus gets back (has anyone even explained where he went or checked on whether he’s stuck in traffic?). And the “full spectrum of feelings surrounding 9/11” I’m willing to bet you one ten-billionth of a Pentagon budget does not include the feelings of any of the survivors and loved ones who have been pleading for 17 years that their suffering not be turned into propaganda for war.

The rest of the article is here.