Making Gaza 'Scream'

Be proud, Americans, be proud.

Making Gaza 'Scream'
- by Stephen Lendman
07/09/07

Making Gaza "scream" is same kind of scheme the Nixon administration planned for Chile after social democrat Salvador Allende won a plurality of the votes in September, 1970. Before the Chilean Congress confirmed him as president in October, an infamous Nixon CIA Director Richard Helms handwritten note read: "One in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!...not concerned with risks involved...$10,000,000 available, more if necessary...make the economy 'scream.' " By it, he meant saving the country from a socially responsible leader, like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, using his nation's wealth equitably and not just for its privileged elites. "Scream" it did through Nixon's "soft line" scheme "to do all within our power to condemn Chile and Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty," in the words of his Chilean ambassador Edward Korry.

It lasted three years until a "hard line" one replaced it on another September 11 Chileans won't soon forget in 1973. It was when a CIA-orchestrated military coup ended the most vibrant democracy in the Americas, replacing it with the brutal 17 year reign of General Augusto Pinochet.

The US has a notorious record of imposing economic or political sanctions against any nation daring to operate outside of Washington Consensus political and market rules. It's also quick to levy trade sanctions for corporate friends whose notion of "free trade" is the one-way kind benefiting them. The Clinton administration was a frequent abuser of these practices imposing them unilaterally against 35 or more countries during its eight years in power. They were also in place against the Soviet bloc during the Cold War and other nations aligned with it. The Bush administration currently has them in place against such countries as Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Burma, Belarus, Sudan, and Venezuela. It's our way of saying we're boss, what we say goes and no outliers are tolerated even when they only wish to govern independently from us or are targeted by a close ally we support.

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The Time Has Come for an Honest Discussion of Air Power
By Tom Engelhardt

The first news stories about the most notorious massacre of the Vietnam War were picked up the morning after from an Army publicity release. These proved fairly typical for the war. On its front page, the New York Times labeled the operation in and around a village called My Lai 4 (or "Pinkville," as it was known to U.S. forces in the area) a significant success. "American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting." United Press International termed what happened there an "impressive victory," and added a bit of patriotic color: "The Vietcong broke and ran for their hide-out tunnels. Six-and-a-half hours later, ‘Pink Village' had become ‘Red, White and Blue Village."

All these dispatches from the "front" were, of course, military fairy tales. (There were no reporters in the vicinity.) It took over a year for a former GI named Ronald Ridenhour, who had heard about the bloody massacre from participants, and a young former AP reporter named Seymour Hersh working in Washington for a news service no one had ever heard of, to break the story, revealing that "red, white, and blue village" had just been red village -- the red of Vietnamese peasant blood. Over 400 elderly men, women, children, and babies had been slaughtered there by Charlie Company of Task Force Barker in a nearly day-long rampage.

Things move somewhat faster these days -- after all, Vietnamese villagers and local officials didn't have access to cell phones to tell their side of the slaughter -- but from the military point of view, the stories these last years have all still seemed to start the same way. Whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, they have been presented by U.S. military spokesmen, or in military press releases, as straightforward successes. The newspaper stories that followed would regularly announce that 17, or 30, or 65 "Taliban insurgents" or "suspected insurgents," or "al-Qaeda gunmen" had been killed in battle after "air strikes" were called in. These stories recorded daily military victories over a determined, battle-hardened enemy.

Most of the time, that was the beginning and end of the matter: Air strike; dead enemies; move on to the next day's bloody events. When it came to Iraq, such air-strike successes generally did not make it into the American press as stories at all, but as scattered, ho-hum paragraphs (based on military announcements) in round-ups of a given day's action focused on far more important matters -- IEDs, suicide car bombs, mortar attacks, sectarian killings. In many cases, air strikes in that country simply went unreported.

From time to time, however, another version of what happened when air strikes were called in on the rural areas of Afghanistan, or on heavily populated neighborhoods in Iraq's cities and towns, filtered out. In this story, noncombatants died, often in sizeable numbers. In the last few weeks "incidents" like this have been reported with enough regularity in Afghanistan to become a modest story in their own right.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.