Treason of the Intellectuals - Hedges

[Peter Lemkin]

The Treason of the Intellectuals

By Chris Hedges

The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among "Bush's useful idiots" argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the "liberal hawks"who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchensdid what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.

These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed "the political cesspool." Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq "do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all." He called the typical anti-war protester a "blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist." The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the warshutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing "patriots" and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own "patriotism" and "realism" about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be toldthe biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren't safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.

Leslie Gelb, in the magazine Foreign Affairs, spelled it out after the invasion of Iraq.

"My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility," he wrote. "We experts' have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we perfect' the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the commonoften wrongwisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less."

The moral cowardice of the power elite is especially evident when it comes to the plight of the Palestinians. The liberal class, in fact, is used to marginalize and discredit those, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, who have the honesty, integrity and courage to denounce Israeli war crimes. And the liberal class is compensated for its dirty role in squelching debate.

"Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take," wrote the late Edward Said. "You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship."

"For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence," Said went on. "If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual."

Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book "The Treason of Intellectuals""La Trahison des Clercs"that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally. Benda wrote that intellectuals were once supposed to be indifferent to popular passions. They "set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence." They looked "as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms." They "preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions." These intellectuals were not, Benda conceded, very often able to prevent the powerful from "filling all history with the noise of their hatred and their slaughters." But they did, at least, "prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as they carried out these activities." In short, Benda asserted, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world." But once the intellectuals began to "play the game of political passions," those who had "acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators." And this is why Michael Moore is correct when he blames The New York Times and the liberal establishment, even more than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for the Iraq War.

"The desire to tell the truth," wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of "The Political Economy of Growth," is "only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity."

Those who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins. They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.

[Jeffrey Orling]

Thanks for posting this essay. Group think manifests wherever there are groups... and those in poiwer, the mainstream media which carries water for them are not the only examples of group think.

The phenemona is likely related to the fact that individuals are forced to accept the information. data, and so forth of others because no individual is capable of having first hand knowledge of the issues, and the broad base of history to inform their thinking along with all sorts of technical esoterica. What appears to happen is that *experts* emerge who announciate over arching positions or views and these are adapted and parroted by the group... those who haven't done the heavy lifting to make their own truly informed decisions.

So evidence becomes critical to forming a position. The problem is then is the evidence set complete? Is it complete enough? Is it accurate? Are the sources of the evidence reliable? Can we understand the evidence?

9/11 is a laboratory for understanding how people think or don't think, parrot and slot themselves into group think and groups which hardly represent the actual details of the event as much as a perspective driven by a political frame. Most people are group thinkers because they are incapable of thinking for themselves, beginning with ferreting out evidence, understanding it and constructing a coherent explanation. They follow a leader.

And when they do that because of career pressure... it says a lot about what society thinks about free thought.

[Magda Hassan]

Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book "The Treason of Intellectuals""La Trahison des Clercs"that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective.

........

"The desire to tell the truth," wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of "The Political Economy of Growth," is "only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity."

Yep. So many universities are part of the whole corporate structure these days. And indeed have brought it in to being. Fee paying students for big money making courses. Whole departments of history and philosophy gone in some places. Tenure is gone. Funding is comes with corporate strings attached. High work loads and short contracts for the lower ranking lecturers and tutors.

[Magda Hassan]

Pretty sure she is the same one that was recently appointed to Amnesty International USA as well.

Chris Hedges Resigns From Human Rights Organization PEN

Posted on Apr 1, 2013

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[TD="align: right"]The Nation Institute and the State Department[/TD]
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[TD]Chris Hedges and Suzanne Nossel.
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The Truthdig columnist was scheduled to speak at events sponsored by PEN American Center next month, but he has resigned his membership in the writers' organization over its executive director, Suzanne Nossel, a former aide to Hillary Clinton who may have coined the term "soft power."
The following is from a 2004 Foreign Affairs article by Nossel titled "Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism":

To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism, which posits that a global system of stable liberal democracies would be less prone to war. Washington, the theory goes, should thus offer assertive leadershipdiplomatic, economic, and not least, militaryto advance a broad array of goals: self-determination, human rights, free trade, the rule of law, economic development, and the quarantine and elimination of dictators and weapons of mass destruction (WMD)

In addition to working for the State Department under Hillary Clinton as deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, Nossel has worked as executive director of Amnesty International USA, and for Human Rights Watch and The Wall Street Journal.
Chris Hedges emailed the following statement to PEN and it is reprinted here with his permission:

I will not be participating as a speaker in the PEN World Voices Festival in May. I will not participate because of your decision to select Suzanne Nossel as Executive Director of the PEN American Center. This appointment makes a mockery of PEN as a human rights organization and belittles the values PEN purports to defend. I spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. The suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation and the plight of those caught up in our imperial wars in countries such as Iraq are not abstractions to me. Nossel's relentless championing of preemptive warwhich under international law is illegalas a State Department official along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of torture and use of extra-judicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any human rights organization, especially one that has global concerns. PEN American Center, by appointing Nossel, has unwittingly highlighted its own failure to defend and speak out for our dissidents, especially Bradley Manning. I hereby resign from PEN. I will wait until the organization returns to its original mandate to defend those who are persecuted, including those within the United States, before returning to the organization.
Sincerely,

Chris Hedges

More about PEN: It is a global organization made up of writer members that advocates for free expression and other human rights causes. The chapter representing the eastern United States is called PEN American Center and was founded in 1922. Its membership has included Robert Frost, Tony Kushner, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie and John Steinbeck.
Read more about the controversy at Dissident Voice.

U.S. Cooption of the Human Rights Movement Continues

An Appeal to PEN: Exec. Director Suzanne Nossel Must Go
by John V. Walsh and Coleen Rowley / April 1st, 2013

When political people have finished with repression and violence PEN can indeed be forgotten. Until then, with all its flounderings and failings and mistaken acts, it is still, I think, a fellowship moved by the hope that one day the work it tries and often manages to do will no longer be necessary.
Arthur Miller who once led PEN

To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism… (which) should offer assertive leadership diplomatic, economic, and not least, military to advance a broad array of goals…
Suzanne Nossel, new Executive Director of PEN American Center in Smart Power, Foreign Affairs (Emphases added)

Suzanne Nossel is a disturbing choice as the new executive director of PEN, American Center, an American branch of the worldwide association of writers and related professions devoted to free expression and "the ideal of one humanity living in peace in the world." The stark contrast between the statements of Arthur Miller and Suzanne Nossel above is enough to sound an alarm. But Nossel's career path, the masters she has served, the stances she has taken and the activities she has sponsored demonstrate profound differences with PEN. PEN cannot remain true to the ideals articulated by Arthur Miller with Nossel at the helm. She is an embodiment of the ongoing, and all too successful, cooption of the Human Rights movement by the U.S. government.
Nossel's AI Backs NATO Assault on Afghanistan: Bombing Women to Free Them
"Amesty's Shilling for U.S. Wars"
Nossel came to PEN after a year's stint as Executive Director of Amnesty International, USA (AI), in 2012. Before that she served in Hillary Clinton's State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. Let's consider her time at AI first.
Nossel assumed her post as Executive Director of AI, in January, 2012. Then in May when NATO held its "Summit Meeting" in Chicago, AI sponsored a "Shadow Summit" there. As part of this effort AI mounted a campaign which employed bus stop billboards supporting the NATO invasion in the words, "NATO, Keep the Progress Going. Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan."[SUP]1[/SUP] "Bombing the women to save them" might well have been the slogan.
AI's "Shadow Summit" featured a number of panels at a Chicago Hotel with the main speaker at the first panel former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who famously observed to Leslie Stahl that the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including an estimated 500,000 children, on her watch during the Clinton administration was a price "worth it" to weaken former U.S. ally, Saddam Hussein. What was such a person doing at an AI event? The same panel featured other female luminaries from the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues, who was also a main speaker with Albright; U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois; and Afifa Azim, General Director and Co-Founder, Afghan Women's Network; along with Moderator Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Deputy Director of AI.
One of us (C.R.) and Anne Wright, who resigned from the State Department in 2003 to protest the war on Iraq, along with a handful of fellow antiwar activists attempted to attend the panel but were refused entrance until some in the group pointed out that they were members of AI. AI then allowed the group to enter, but in an apparent lapse of concern for free speech, only if signs opposing NATO's war on Afghanistan were left outside. Such is the forgetfulness that proximity to power breeds. In a written account of the panel entitled "Amnesty's Shilling for U.S. Wars," Rowley and Wright noted that the CIA's, "Red Cell" in a report disclosed by Wikileaks, had recommended a strategy of using "women's rights" to sell the war in Afghanistan. Rowley and Wright continued in their piece: "When we saw that audience participation was going to be limited to questions selected from the small note cards being collected, we departed. We noted, even in that short time, however, how easy it was for these U.S. government officials to use the "good and necessary cause" of women's rights to get the audience into the palm of their collective hand just as the CIA's "strategic communication" expert predicted!" One has to ask what is afoot when a former State Dept. official takes over an organization like AI, which then neatly fits its approach into that of the U.S. government.
A few months after the appearance of the Rowley/Wright piece and complaints by other members and donors of AI, Nossel resigned unceremoniously. A call to AI's national office unearthed the reply from a staff member that the "staff had been told" that Nossel had resigned "for personal reasons." The promise of a return call by someone more knowledgeable did not materialize. Who was responsible, on or off the board, for hiring Nossel in the first place remains a mystery.
The Revolving Door: A Formula for Cooption
Nossel had previously worked at the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Nossel is often credited with coining the phrase "Smart Power,"[SUP]2[/SUP] which Clinton repeated interminably in her Senate confirmation hearings to characterize how she would run State and which Nossel defined in a 2004 article in Foreign Affairs as "assertive leadership diplomatic, economic, and not least, military." What was this smartly powered State Department like into which Nossel was hired? Perhaps Ralph Nader has taken the measure of it most perceptively, in a CounterPunch essay entitled, "Hillary's Bloody Legacy: Militarizing the State Department":

Behind the public relations sheen, the photo-opportunities with groups of poor people in the developing world, an ever more militarized State Department operated under Clinton's leadership.
A militarized State Department is more than a repudiation of the Department's basic charter of 1789, for the then-named Department of Foreign Affairs, which envisioned diplomacy as its mission. Secretary Clinton reveled in tough, belligerent talk and action on her many trips to more than a hundred countries. She would warn or threaten "consequences" on a regular basis. She supported soldiers in Afghanistan, the use of secret Special Forces in other places and "force projection" in East Asia to contain China. She aggressively supported or attacked resistance movements in dictatorships, depending on whether a regime played to Washington's tune.
Because Defense Secretary Robert Gates was openly cool to the drum beats for war on Libya, Clinton took over and choreographed the NATO ouster of the dictator, Muammar al-Gaddafi, long after he had given up his mass destruction weaponry and was working to re-kindle relations with the U.S. government and global energy corporations. Libya is now in a disastrous warlord state-of-chaos. Many fleeing fighters have moved into Mali, making that vast country into another battlefield drawing U.S. involvement. Blowback!

Thus did Nossel's strategy of "Smart Power" play out as she worked at the side of Clinton.
Before working at State, Nossel worked at Human Rights Watch, which has come under increasing criticism for its distorted accounts of the Chavez government in Venezuela and other official enemies of the US. And before that she worked at the UN under Richard Holbrooke as the Clintons masterminded the bombing of Yugoslavia and pushed NATO eastward in violation of assurances given by Reagan to Gorbachev.
Here we behold a revolving door between government and human rights NGOs, much like the one connecting the Pentagon and defense contractors or between regulatory agencies and the corporate entities they are to regulate. Nossel is clearly aware of the use that the U.S. government can make of organizations like PEN, writing in her 2004 "Smart Power" essay that "that the United States' own hand is not always its best tool: U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals." In what sense can PEN claim to be a "non-governmental organization" with Nossel in charge? In what sense can PEN claim to protect writers from the state with someone in charge who has been a frequent and unapologetic presence in the corridors of power?
The Subversion of Human Rights Organizations
For many decades the rhetoric of human rights has been used by the West to justify its aggressive actions around the world. James Peck in his superb and much neglected work, Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights, painstakingly and meticulously documents such subversion over the past 50 years. But the subversion goes farther than the selective attention often paid to official enemies and the relative neglect of human rights violations by U.S. allies. He also points out that the concept of human rights that has prevailed in the West over this period is a shriveled one, basically confined to civil rights. Although the mainstream human rights movement in the West claims to take its inspiration from the UN Declaration of Human Rights, it rarely mentions Articles 25 and 26, among others, which affirm health care and education as rights. Thus the fact that Gaddafi's Libya had the highest literacy rate or highest score in all of Africa on the UN's Human Development Index counted for nothing in assessments of Gaddafi. Nor is faintest praise to be found for the many hundreds of millions lifted from poverty and made literate in New China.
Similarly, Jean Bricmont in his insightful, Humanitarian Imperialism, another book studiously avoided by "progressives" in the West, details the use of human rights rhetoric to gain the support of European intellectuals for the Clintons' assault on the Balkans. This in fact marked a turning point in the view of intellectuals toward the wars of present day imperial powers on weaker nations, a view that set the stage for assaults on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and now Syria. It marked a sharp break with the opposition of intellectuals to the U.S. war on Vietnam. The important principle of sovereignty enshrined in international law to protect weak nations from falling prey to powerful ones was rudely tossed aside, with much talk of human rights as the justification.
PEN Shows No Concern for Julian Assange or Bradley Manning
The principle at work here is not new. Julien Benda raised it long ago in The Treason of the Intellectuals. As Benda said, "There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice." In our time we may identify Noam Chomsky and the late Alexander Cockburn among those who follow in the tradition of Benda. They represent the best in the tradition of PEN.
The question is which way will PEN go the way of Benda or continue along the way of Nossel. Today a search on the PEN, America, web site readily yields entries for Pussy Riot, Ai Weiwei, and Liu Xiaobo, but nothing is to be found for "Bradley Manning" or "Julian Assange"! That in itself speaks volumes about Nossel's PEN. As Chomsky and others have often pointed out, the primary duty of intellectuals is to critique their own ruling elite. After all, we can most affect our own rulers and it is their actions we are most responsible for. And that is what requires genuine courage. Criticizing elites in countries that are America's official enemies is an easy and secure career path.
PEN members should take action
For those who are appalled by what is happening at PEN, here are links to a list of current and newly elected officers and Trustees. They bear ultimate responsibility for the path that PEN is taking and for Suzanne Nossel's employ. The issue can also be raised at the upcoming PEN World Voices events in NYC. It is clear that many speakers at these events, perhaps the overwhelming majority, hold views quite the opposite of Nossel's, as well they should. Nossel should resign. Speaking out in cases like this is the only way to prevent the Empire from corrupting all it touches, including the human rights movement.

• The poster can be seen here. [↩]
  
• Although Nossel is often credited with the term "Smart Power," from the title of her article in Foreign Affairs in 2004, Joseph Nye, Dean emeritus of Harvard's Kennedy School of government and another Pentagon and State Department functionary over the decades when not slaving in the fields of academe, published a book in 2003 with the title, Smart Power. [↩]
  

John V. Walsh, lately become an associate member of PEN, is a biophysicist/neuroscientist living in the Boston and area and a contributor to DissidentVoice.org, CounterPunch.org, and Antiwar.com. Coleen Rowley, now an antiwar activist in the Twin Cities area, is a former FBI special agent and legal counsel in the Minneapolis field office, who wrote a "whistleblower" memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the FBI's pre-9 / 11 failures. The authors can be reached at: John.Endwar@gmail.com">John.Endwar@gmail.com. We are interested in hearing from members of PEN and others who are interested in taking action. Read other articles by John V. Walsh and Coleen Rowley.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/04/u-s-co...more-48267

[Jeffrey Orling]

Yep. So many universities are part of the whole corporate structure these days. And indeed have brought it in to being. Fee paying students for big money making courses. Whole departments of history and philosophy gone in some places. Tenure is gone. Funding is comes with corporate strings attached. High work loads and short contracts for the lower ranking lecturers and tutors.

Not to mention all the military funded research done in Academia.

[Magda Hassan]

Not to mention all the military funded research done in Academia.

Yes, there is much of that too. The armed branch of the corporate world.

[Peter Lemkin]

Great letter to PEN, and brave move by Hedges. He really has become such a moral leader and voice for moralitym justice, peace. So much so, given our 'system', I begin to fear for his 'health' as more come to hear and understand his words - and the meaning of his words and thoughts. Such a moral man.....in an immoral World and speaking Truth to Power from such an immoral Country/Empire.

[Phil Dragoo]

Hedges splits his attack between that on war boostering liberal hawks, e.g., Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and neglect of the Palestinian plight.

Yet did not Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton invite Yassir Arafat to their White House more than any other guest? Did their efforts earn the 2000 Intifada and waterboarding in the Lake of Forgetfulness.

Credit where credit is due, please.

War in Iraq required a total buy-in of the Tower Trick, and Chelsea worried the Bush tax cuts would prevent improving the air quality Hillary deplored. The statements of the SecState emeritus and present are indistinguishable from the much bemoaned neocons.

Hedges laments the loss of a billet at the NYT but if he eschews PEN on account of Nossel why not the Old Gray home of Walter Duranty.

Wherever one is is a fine place to start--

--and witness Coleen Rowley on US cooption of human rights: she took Robert S. Mueller to task over criminal negligence of her flying lesson reports as a special agent pre-Tower.

Mueller whom Obama kept on for two additional years, as he kept on Robert Gates--who was too weak on Libya for Hillary's taste.

And it's a taste for blood--and the contortions surrounding Benghazi were to avoid talking about the shiny new war aka Arab Spring

embodying all those soft power elements extolled by Hillary and Nossel.

In it all I do not see the Old Business cleaned up, while all that is new is built upon it

that is, the state killed Kennedy that war might continue as the business model

The towers came down in the manner of the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, Tonkin Gulf, your casus belli here

President Kennedy sought human rights not the narrower civil rights; a departure from colonial exploitation and a withdrawal from interference

Now it's interference all the time on every channel and no one questions immunity for Los Zetas, arms for Sinaloa and MB, Road to Mali, Road to Syria

The CIA is used in all of this, and has been identified as providing key players Dulles, Angleton, Helms, Joannides, Phillips, McCord, Hunt, and more

How is the infiltration of PEN different from that of the National Students Association, how is Hedges, Walsh, Rowley indictment different from Agee

Now in the fiftieth year of the Warren-Dulles obscenity, Kissinger and Rockefeller live

What an interesting conversation Hedges might have with Kerry regarding the veteran who took it to the Senate in 1971 and has become a footman

The mad woman might demand wild-eyed and waving, what difference does it make

The current outrage of the ideal at the compromise of the real might give a bow to those who've been marginalized and ridiculed for fifty years

In for a penny, in for a pound

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[David Guyatt]

Not to mention all the military funded research done in Academia.

Yes, there is much of that too. The armed branch of the corporate world.

Speaking of which...

Back in the 1990's I remember reading a briefing about a private thought-tank meeting held, as I remember, at Fort Bragg. It was stated in there that the plan was, for the future - fifty years down the line -- to have a largely privatised US military. For all sorts of reasons, but restraint (or actually the lack of it) being a primary reason.

I remember thinking at the time that this would never come to pass as it sounded so bizarre.

More fool me.

[Magda Hassan]

... For all sorts of reasons, but restraint (or actually the lack of it) being a primary reason.

I remember thinking at the time that this would never come to pass as it sounded so bizarre.

More fool me.

Perfect for plausible deniability. Less payout from government coffers for lawsuits etc and can look fiscally responsible by not having a bloated military. The government can say they have clean hands and are a peace loving nation not interfering in other nations affairs while still achieving military objectives. None of that silly Geneva convention red tape.