Obama: the Smiling Assassin - International Social/Political

A DEVASTATING retaliatory attack on the USA leading to a major international conflict would be perfectly in character with Serbian history. Serbs seem to possess an uncanny ability to dispatch the world’s most powerful rulers – the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1389 and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, early 20th century.

A people and a nation victimised throughout history develop unusual cunning and extremely effective survival skills, as Hitler’s invading forces also discovered during WWII.

Attacking Serbs is an extremely dangerous pursuit at the best of times but attempting to steal Serbia’s heartland, Kosovo, is pure insanity; Serbs do not take kindly to foreigners attacking their ANCESTRAL HOMELANDS; every Serb in the world is aware the Balkan conflict is far from over! You have plenty to fear, you dumbfuck yankee doodle DUNCES!

One could almost feel sorry for the hapless yanks but not for traditional allies Russia and China – both may soon regret abandoning Serbia in its time of greatest need! Involving superpowers in conflict is child’s play for Serbs – too easy ‘comrades,’ far too easy! Unless immediate steps are taken to return the STOLEN province of Kosovo, via legal avenues and military assertion – the ISSUE WILL BE FORCED, of that you can be assured, c-o-m-r-a-d-e chicken-shits!

Once again Serbs are poised, by virtue of their invisibility and presence in every Western nation, to strike a lethal blow to the throat of the enemy!

But this short paper deals with the pathetic US puppet, B. H. ‘slave boy’ Obama, and the methodology employed by America to distract the world from REMEDIAL ACTION in the face of the largest threat to world peace seen since the lunacy of the Nazis!

We have just witnessed the latest tactics of the US in Sri Lanka. Regardless of the (enormous) cost in innocent CIVILIAN lives, Tamil separatists were relentlessly pursued/attacked in blitzkrieg fashion until the leadership was either routed or killed. However, experts are aware the situation is extremely precarious. Unless social reforms and programs are implemented immediately -- to alleviate the extreme suffering of the Tamil people -- the movement will simply go underground and in record time, rise from the ashes like a Phoenix! Independence movements are not dependent on personalities they are fuelled by dreams, passion, desire and the overwhelming need for JUSTICE.

The idiotic cake-cutting media display of the very nervous Sinhalese leadership betrays their anxiety and naivety. Experience and sense dictate that all such ‘celebrations’ are premature.

Until such time as Tamils are treated equally with dignity and respect all ‘victory’ celebrations are hollow events – the network that supported the Tigers over the past three decades remains almost completely intact; a fact the compliant Western mass media failed to address!

It is Western media tactics that return me to the Obama issue. We note that reams have been written on what should now be obvious to all -- OBAMA IS A SERVANT OF THE ELITE EXECUTIVE, A BETRAYER OF THE PEOPLE AND A MONUMENTAL FRAUD! So why the continuous discourse on this redundant subject?

Western propaganda has developed a new slant on an old tactic, the ‘in plain sight invisibility trick;’ (for want of a better expression). Constant coverage of a subject regardless of whether the presentations are favourable or negative diverts focus, attention and ENERGY away from VIABLE SOLUTIONS and replaces the need for POSITIVE ACTION with constant media drivel! While the masses are fascinated/distracted by ‘coverage,’ THE POWERS REMAIN UNASSAILED and free to continue on their destructive course.

Surely the penny should have dropped with Obama when it was widely reported that he (and Clinton) attended the last Bilderberg meeting in Virginia! NO? Well what about his early formative relationship with Kissinger, hint, hint!

There is no shortage of critical material written on the previous regime BUT did it MATERIALISE into ARRESTS? NO! Bush, Cheney and the rest all walk free; furthermore, Cheney is so arrogant and contemptuous of the Law he openly admits that he approved torture, in fact he continues to brag about his role in the most criminal regime in US history!

Perhaps I should state here that the world’s ‘secret’ weapons against the USA are American idiocy, fear and PARALYSIS – but without doubt the greatest American weakness is raw stupidity/dumbness. The nations that have overtaken the USA in many areas ALL have FREE education systems based on natural selection and MERIT. The American system is based on privilege and/or money, which results in types like G W Bush ascending to the presidency and THEREIN LIES THE INEVITABLE FUTURE DEFEAT OF THE U.S. ‘dumbfuck’ Ay! 'We' are not just a ‘little’ smarter or quicker!

The American masses have become PASSIVE CONSUMERS of feeble propaganda rather than ACTIVE PURSUERS of JUSTICE, another symptom of social decay/defeat!

This is particularly the case with the so-called progressive media.

Thousands of articles relating to Obama’s lack of integrity have been written but few (if any) appeal to the reader's innate sense of JUSTICE and call for remedial ACTION!

DIRECT ACTION has always been the most appropriate (ONLY) remedy for corrupt leadership, in fact there are no solutions without A-C-T-I-O-N! If thousands of articles and releases are issued daily WITHOUT a RALLYING CALL then they have no more merit than toilet paper.

I am staggered by the American ‘left’ actually engaging in apologetics for Obama – who are these ‘writers’ actually working for? Authors and outlets go so far as to heavily criticise Obama but always stop short of ‘demanding his head’ let lone RALLYING READERS TO ACT IN THE NATION’S BEST INTERESTS!

The ‘powers’ win regardless of favourable or unfavourable coverage! Paid for hacks never offer readers VIABLE SOLUTIONS or rally their readers under the banners of JUSTICE, LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY – principles lost under the previous regime and left to wither and die under the PUPPET Obama regime!

Note well, that REAL leaders like Martin Luther King never failed to rally the people to the cause of FREEDOM and JUSTICE.

Traditionally it has always been the role of journalists to preserve our hard won freedoms and liberties. The guardians of democracy have always been the journalistic fraternity – well, take a good look at them NOW! Paid for lackeys not worth pissing on!

While president, Bill Clinton forced neoliberal policies on Haiti, delayed President Aristide’s return after a US-backed coup and held Haitian refugees at Gitmo without rights. [He's just what the 'doctor' ordered!]

Former US President Bill Clinton has been named by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as his special UN envoy to Haiti. Clinton will reportedly travel to the country at least four times a year.

“[It’s] an opportunity to bring in resources to address the economic insecurity that plagues Haiti,” says Brian Concannon, a human rights lawyer who works extensively in Haiti. “But if the nomination is to be more than a publicity stunt, the UN needs to honestly shed a spotlight on the international community’s role in creating that instability, including unfair trade and debt policies, and the undermining and overthrowing of Haiti’s constitutional government.”

Shining such a spotlight on those who created the instability, as Concannon suggests, would mean examining Clinton’s own role as president of the US during one of Haiti’s most horrifyingly dark periods.

Reuters news agency quotes a diplomat as saying Clinton is “an ‘excellent choice’ to help unlock Haiti’s potential as an investment target,” adding that his appointment “could attract investment in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation and help stabilize the country.”

That last statement about “stabiliz[ing]” Haiti would be humorous for its irony if the reality—and Clinton’s history in Haiti—wasn’t so deadly serious. The fact is that, as US president, Clinton’s policies helped systematically destabilize Haiti.

Dan Coughlin, who spent years as a journalist in Haiti in the 1990s for Inter Press Service, said he was “incredulous” when he heard the news. “Given the Clinton Administration’s aggressive pursuit of policies that profitted Haiti’s tiny elite, the IMF and big corporations at the expense of Haiti’s farmers and urban workers, the appointment does not bode well for the kind of fundamental change so needed in a country that has given so much to humankind,” Coughlin says.

In September 1991, the US backed the violent overthrow of the government of Haiti’s democratically-elected leftist priest President Jean Bertrand Aristide after he was in power less than a year. Aristide had defeated a US-backed candidate in the 1990 Haitian presidential election. The military coup leaders and their paramilitary gangs of CIA-backed murderous thugs, including the notorious FRAPH paramilitary units, were known for hacking the limbs off of Aristide supporters (and others) along with an unending slew of other horrifying crimes.

When Clinton came to power, he played a vicious game with Haiti that allowed the coup regime to continue rampaging Haiti and further destabilized the country. What’s more, in the 1992 election campaign, Bill Clinton campaigned on a pledge to reverse what he called then-President George HW Bush’s “cruel policy” of holding Haitian refugees at Guantanamo with no legal rights in US courts. Upon his election, however, Clinton reversed his position and sided with the Bush administration in denying the Haitians legal rights. the Haitians were held in atrocious conditions and the new Democratic president was sued by the Center for Constitutional Rights (sound familiar?).

While Clinton and his advisers publicly expressed their dismay with the coup, they simultaneously refused to support the swift reinstatement of the country’s democratically elected leader and would, in fact, not allow Aristide’s return until Washington received guarantees that: 1. Aristide would not lay claim to the years of his presidency lost in forced exile and; 2. US neoliberal economic plans were solidified as the law of the land in Haiti.

“The Clinton administration was credited for working for the return to power of Jean Bertrand Aristide after he was overthrown in a military coup,” says author William Blum. “But, in fact, Clinton had stalled the return for as long as he could, and had instead tried his best to return anti-Aristide conservatives to a leading power role in a mixed government, because Aristide was too leftist for Washington’s tastes.” Blum’s book “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” includes a chapter on the history of the US role in Haiti.

The fact that the coup against the democratically-elected president of Haiti was allowed to continue unabated for three full years seemed to be less offensive to Clinton than Aristide’s progressive vision for Haiti. As Blum observed in his book, “[Clinton] was not actually repulsed by [coup leader Raoul] Cédras and company, for they posed no ideological barrier to the United States continuing the economic and strategic control of Haiti it’s maintained for most of the century. Unlike Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a man who only a year earlier had declared: ‘I still think capitalism is a mortal sin.’”

Blum added: “Faced ultimately with Aristide returning to power, Clinton demanded and received — and then made sure to publicly announce — the Haitian president’s guarantee that he would not try to remain in office to make up for the time lost in exile. Clinton of course called this ‘democracy,’ although it represented a partial legitimization of the coup.” Indeed, Haiti experts say that Clinton could have restored Aristide to power under an almost identical arrangement years earlier than he did.

When Aristide finally returned to Haiti, as Blum notes, “Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s reception was a joyous celebration filled with optimism. However, unbeknownst to his adoring followers, while they were regaining Aristide, they may have lost Aristidism.”

As The Los Angeles Times reported at the time:

“While Bill Clinton oversaw the return of President Aristide in 1994, he also put significant constraints on what Aristide was able to do once back in power,” says Bill Fletcher, Jr, the Executive Editor of BlackCommentator.com and the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum. “Clinton advanced a neo-liberal agenda for Haiti thereby undermining the efforts of an otherwise progressive populist administration (Aristide’s). There is no reason to believe that [as a UN envoy] ex-President Clinton will introduce or support efforts to radically break Haiti from under the thumb of the USA and the dire poverty which has been a significant consequence of said domination.”

It is apparent that regardless of who is in power, conservative ideals are firmly entrenched not simply in the American psyche, but are an integral part of U.S. policies. One could blame liberals for not having a backbone when combating conservatives, but chances are that the real reason may be even more onerous; one likely explanation is governmental psychological warfare.

Why did Congress last week quietly approve almost another $100 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Why are displaced Mexican migrants scapegoated for all the ills of U.S. society? Why does the United States escape blame for its insatiable thirst for drugs [in fueling the drug wars in Mexico]? Why is the United States always supposed to side with Israel, without ever having a debate? Why does “war as peace” continue to be U.S. policy?

With President Obama, things were supposed to be different; the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were supposed to come to a screeching halt. Guantanamo would be immediately closed down and torture would unequivocally be denounced and those flouting U.S. and international laws would finally be held to account in a court of law.

Instead, we see vacillation or escalation on virtually every front. Just on economic grounds alone, one would think that shutting down both wars would be a no-brainer. So the question is logical; with Obama in the White House and Democrats in control of Congress, why do conservative ideals and policies – such as the right to permanent war – continue to be entrenched throughout the U.S. political landscape?

Most assuredly, the answer lies in the lies that this nation has swallowed as part of its national narrative. For example, several years ago, as I was finishing up my PhD studies, one of my professors was explaining how language and minds can be manipulated – simply by the words we employ and the order in which they are employed. Such a sophisticated process can pre-determine not only what we think and discuss, but when we do this. Who delivers the words and ideas can also influence how people will feel towards any given issue. One example is the use of Colin Powell [and his contrived account] to convince a skeptical world before the UN about the need to invade Iraq [Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld and Rice had zero credibility].

As the seminar professor was explaining this process, I raised my hand: “This sounds like psy-ops – like CIA work.”

At this, the professor laughed: “You must not be too familiar with our field. The great majority of all mass communications research is funded by the defense department.”

This confirmed what I had always suspected; this would explain how the Iraq War was sold – through an unquestioning media that simply acted liked stenographers – repeating complete fabrications, affirmed by “military experts” (in the employ of Defense contractors) that even grade school children could see through. Yet that would not have been enough to have convinced a skeptical public.

For such a special operation to work, fear, hate and ignorance had to be thrown into the mix, helping to advance the nonsensical argument that Iraq constituted a grave threat to the world. Yet, on the heels of the Cold War – in which the United States was pitted against a superpower that actually had a nuclear arsenal of thousands – Americans were supposed to be afraid of a country that, in effect, used slingshots as part of its air defense. While fear, hate and ignorance usually work in any society, all this was not enough to sell this war.

To sell the war – in fact, to sell the notion of a right to permanent worldwide war (The so-called War on Terror) – required bringing in three additional factors: God, hyper-nationalism and a “homeland.” If Bush could convince the public that God was siding with the United States against fanatical Arab/Muslim terrorists who were responsible for 9-11, then all that remained was to convince the public that it was their patriotic duty to support the president in this God-inspired civilizational war to protect the Fatherland against infidels. This civilizational Jihad or Crusade included warring against Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11 and that had not ever been a threat to the United States (see Rumsfeld’s “religious” memos to Bush in this week’s issue of GQ.)

This war – for the hearts and minds of Westerners – appears to have failed except amongst the FOX-TV-viewing public and its right-wing radio auxiliaries.

And yet, even with a change in administrations, conservative ideals and the conservative agenda continue to dominate the national agenda. Specifically, in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan – the wars continue and Dick Cheney and his ultra-conservative cohorts continue to dictate the nation’s political agenda. The reason: think psy-ops and think subterfuge. While we discuss the proprieties of torture and other enhanced interrogation techniques – we never get around to discussing illegal wars that have resulted in the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands and the displacement of millions. Within this context, we ignore the larger crimes against humanity by the Bush administration and instead debate whether torture works or not.

In a nation of laws – beyond a bad cliché, “going forward” – or not pursuing justice – has now become “conventional wisdom.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi advanced this nonsensical conservative idea when she refused to hold impeachment hearings. In a poetic sense of justice, her strategy of “not looking back” is coming back to bite her. Rather than the architects of the criminal war being investigated, she now is on the hot seat. It is possible that this same “going forward” agenda – which has also been accepted by President Obama – may come back to derail the president’s seemingly naïve agenda.

Author retains copyright.

Government is unrepentant about squalid conditions, saying Tamil Tigers must be weeded out from among civilians.

Many of the quarter of a million people held in internment camps in Sri Lanka face up to two years behind razor wire, a government official said today.

Despite international concern over conditions inside the camps, the defence ministry spokesman, Lakshman Hulugalle, said Sri Lanka was not prepared to let the UN dictate terms over the length of time people could be held.

A UN spokesman, Gordon Weiss, said he was "shocked" at the revelation, which ran counter to previous government assurances.

"It was our understanding that the government was to return 80% of the people to their homes by the end of the year, or at least try to," said Weiss.

The UN, Britain and human rights groups have been pressing the government in Colombo to release people from the camps as soon as possible. But Hulugalle said: "The UN can't dictate terms to us. They can always make a request but the UN hasn't asked us to release people. The government has a plan to resettle them. Let these agencies come and join us."

Hulugalle said the government had already resettled almost 200,000 people after the east of the country was liberated from Tamil Tiger control. "We were able to resettle them within nine months. This operation will take a little longer – one and a half to two years," he said.

Some elderly people with close relatives who could look after them had been released, but many others would have to stay behind for up to two years.

Responding to criticism of conditions inside the camps, where detainees have told the Guardian they are short of food, water and medicines, Hulugalle said: "You can't expect five-star hospitality in an area like that. What we are providing are the basics – security, food, health and schools. These are basic. You can't expect an Oxford college."

Hulugalle said the government had turned down an offer of 750 previously used blankets from the Hilton hotel group because people did not want to be treated as second-grade citizens. "They are not beggars," he said.

The government says it needs to hold the civilians until it can establish whether or not they are Tamil Tigers.

The news came as the Red Cross suspended delivery of supplies to displaced civilians after the Sri Lanka blocked access to camps it controls in the country's north.

"There is no access to these camps at this particular moment," said a Red Cross official in Geneva.

A second Sri Lankan official revealed that hardcore rebels were being held and interrogated in a secure unit in the south of the country. The defence ministry has refused to discuss their fate. Thousands of other former fighters are being held in what the government describes as "rehabilitation centres".

Suhada Gamalath, the man in charge of the jails where the majority of Tamil Tigers who surrendered are being held, said about 100 fighters were being held in a prison in Boosse, in the south of the country. He said they would eventually be brought to trial and could face up to 20 years' jail if convicted of murder.

Gamalath said between 2,000 and 3,000 former Tamil Tigers were imprisoned, with up to 60 more arriving every day. Most had given themselves up, he said. The total included about 250 below the age of 18, he said, with some as young as 14.

Save the Children claims that at least a quarter of pregnant and breastfeeding women in the internment camps are acutely malnourished.

Another government minister disputed the military's assessment of the timescale for rehabilitation, but admitted the task posed particular problems. The disaster management and human rights minister, Mahinda Samarasinghe, claimed that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had infiltrated the camps and there was a danger that some of those being held were potential suicide bombers.

Samarasinghe said the area where the civilians once lived had been heavily mined by the LTTE and would take time to clear. He insisted the government was committed to getting the lives of its citizens back to normal at the earliest possible opportunity and that they would be consulted throughout the process. But he said it was likely to take longer than the year it took to resettle civilians displaced by fighting in the east.

Samarasinghe also criticised some of the efforts of the UN agencies involved, claiming that tents supplied to house detainees were inadequate and unable to stand up to rain, and that toilets supplied by Unicef were not good enough.

"As much as they tell us to maintain international standards, it is incumbent on us as a government that if there are shortcomings on their part we tell them," he said.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is due to arrive in Sri Lanka on Friday to press the government to work towards reconciliation after 26 years of war and to allow humanitarian groups access to the camps.

The UN said Ban had met the Sri Lankan health minister in Geneva to press for access to the former battlefields. He said in a statement that the situation in Sri Lanka was of "grave and growing concern" and said more care needed to be provided for those affected by the conflict.

© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited

Pornography, feminisation of the enemy? Confused over what Obama’s view on Guantanamo and the backlog of torture images from Abu Ghraib? Join the club.

The centrepiece of United States President Barack Obama’s PR campaign to show the world the US is the nice cop was to end the military tribunals, which he called “an enormous failure” during last year’s presidential campaign, and close the infamous Guantanamo prison. This was Obama’s first major “achievement” upon assuming office.

Rumblings about the impossibility of closing Guantanamo were being heard even as Obama took office. It appears there’s no place to send the prisoners, most of whom are innocent of anything other than fighting invaders, if that. Congress does not want to allow them to come to stay in equally notorious US jails, where overcrowding, violence, drugs and AIDS are endemic. Nor is Congress willing to fork over any money to close Guantanamo. Of course this is nonsense. Venezuela’s president offered to take them all, but Obama dare not accept any favours from someone so principled, lest his house of cards come tumbling down.

As for the tribunals, Obama faces two deadlines: his 120-day review of the tribunals has now ended, and on 27 May the trial of Ahmed Al-Darbi, a Saudi accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, was scheduled to begin, and it appears it now will, but under slightly improved conditions, including restricting hearsay evidence. The tribunals now must move quickly in a race against the clock before Guantanamo is scheduled to be closed next January. If the prison is indeed closed and the trials are still going on then, the detainees will have to be brought to the US, where they will receive greater legal rights.

About 20 of the 241 detainees currently at Guantanamo will now be tried by military tribunals along with 13 already in the works. The rest of the detainees must either be released, transferred to other nations or tried by civilian prosecutors in US federal courts. It’s also possible that some could continue to be held indefinitely without trial as prisoners of war, though government officials insist they will now receive full Geneva Conventions protections.

The decision to persist with the tribunals was immediately attacked by critics. “It’s disappointing that Obama is seeking to revive rather than end this failed experiment,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s no detainee at Guantanamo who cannot be tried and shouldn’t be tried in the regular federal courts system.”

How did this sorry state of affairs come about so soon after all the fanfare?

Obama stressed to families of victims of the USS Cole attack when he met them in February that he would not free “potential jihadists", but when Binyam Mohamed, suspected in a plot to set off a “dirty bomb” inside the US, was repatriated to Britain and released, this was greeted by a hysterical outcry in the US, ignoring the fact that Mohamed was determined to be innocent by the world’s oldest upholder of due process. The pressures on Obama to hold the Bush course are immense, with former vice president Richard Cheney brazenly attacking him as a wimp on US television.

Then there’s Obama’s decision to block the court-ordered release of more torture photos. He was for the pictures being released before deciding last week he was against it, apparently convinced by military officials the photos would increase danger for US troops.

Dawdling, of course, just confirms the view of the rest of the world, especially among Muslims, that Obama is not the principled liberal they were led to expect, that he is afraid to make a clean breast of the past atrocities, that he is merely a politically correct Bush lite. The irony being that, contrary to Cheney’s ravings, it is his very indecisiveness that increases the danger for US troops.

The legal intricacies of Guantanamo vs US incarceration and jurisdiction are less sensational than the torture pictures. But the likelihood of many Muslims actually seeing the latest shots of US troops in Iraq sodomising those who resist them is remote. In any case, the pictures were originally intended for possible publication by the torturers themselves. This startling revelation was made by Seymour Hersh in 2004 when he exposed the logic behind the officially-condoned US strategy of sexual torture. The idea was to use blackmail to encourage victims to work for the occupiers as spies, threatening to publish the photos unless the victims agreed to collaborate with the occupiers. A government consultant revealed to Hersh, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population."

The strategy, of course, failed spectacularly, and the photos — old and new — are being consumed primarily by jingoistic Americans revelling in such scenes of violence inflicted on the “enemy”, inured to the monstrosity of this by their regular diet of media violence and Islamophobia. Already the “blocked” photos are being leaked all over the net, making Obama’s last minute efforts a fool’s errand.

How such unconscionable behaviour became official US policy is fascinating. American pilots were trained during the “first” Gulf War by watching pornographic films, according to the Washington Post at the time. In order to better subjugate Arab Iraq, according to Joseph Massad, “American imperial military culture supermasculinises not only its own male soldiers, but also its female soldiers who can partake of the feminisation of Iraqi men.” The pornographic pictures are merely the logical outcome of this strategy to subdue the so-called enemy, constructed by diabolical Pentagon strategists. The 2003 invasion updated this strategy, though with unintended consequences, as new technology allowed simple soldiers to produce their own DVDs of their sadistic frolics.

This stark reality is inverted in Washington, as interpreted by Obama’s envoy of peace to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about US media efforts in Pakistan: “Concurrent with the insurgency is an information war. We are losing that war.” Rather than acknowledging past sins, however, he advocates even more TV and radio propaganda supporting the US wars. Holbrooke is referring to the $100 million propaganda campaign launched by the Bush regime in Iraq in 2005 by a Washington-based PR firm to plant administration propaganda in the Iraqi news media and to pay Iraqi journalists to write favourable stories about the occupation.

So it appears withholding the Abu Ghraib photos is really part of the US government media war, just as the question mark over Guantanamo is really part of the military plans to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come hell or high water. And that these policies are not up for discussion. The reversal of Obama’s key policies after only a few months does not bode well for him or the US.

Perhaps withholding the photos is also connected with the appointment of Stanley McChrystal as head of the military in Afghanistan, which should brace itself for more Abu Ghraib-style action. McChrystal cut his teeth in Iraq, where he directed the Joint Special Operations Command’s special operation teams, which carry out assassinations and terrorise local populations opposed to the occupation. McChrystal was a favourite of Rumsfeld and Cheney. He was a direct participant in overseeing torture, according to a report by Esquire and Human Rights Watch in 2006.

Just about everyone but the US officials conducting their war on terrorism realise by now that it is this very policy that is producing more and more jihadists, and will continue to produce them until Obama, or some future less timid president, declares an end to this campaign of terror being conducted by the US itself, with its allies dragged kicking and screaming behind it.

This is no time for Obama to be indecisive. Guantanamo must be closed and remaining prisoners must be tried in US courts or repatriated. If that’s a problem, he can always take up Chavez’s offer. And patch up relations with him and Castro in the process. Hell, why not give back Guantanamo to Cuba as a peace offering while he’s at it? The important thing is not to blink while he’s doing what’s right, or else the jackals of war will chew him to shreds.

The latest fear among Democrats is that the gulf between them and the Republicans is widening, even as Democratic policies are gaining support among the people. Huh? They should take a leaf from FDR’s book, to fear nothing but fear alone. Let the Republicans march into the wilderness. Take control of US politics for the next two decades by following truly popular, socially just policies. Americans are not imperialists at heart. They will follow you. And be sure to close Guantanamo.

© 2009 Eric Walberg, Al Ahram Weekly

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