All language subtitles for CI4

They called it Trinity.

On the morning of July 16th, 1945,

in a remote desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico,

the atomic age is born.

Some scientists weep openly, others are triumphant.

Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, receives a cryptic message.

It reads: "Child is born.

Its cries could be heard at my farm, and the light in his eyes seen at yours."

The atomic bomb is the culmination of the Manhattan Project,

one of the largest, most secretive and most expensive undertakings by any government in history.

Employing more than 200,000 people it was formed by some of the greatest scientists of the age.

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita;

Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that

he should do his duty and, to impress him,

takes on his multi-armed form and says:

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Three weeks later, a squadron of bombers leaves for Hiroshima.

Upon departure, a pilot named Major Sweeney describes seeing

the most beautiful sunrise he has ever witnessed -

a great, big, red ball of fire coming out of the ocean to the east.

He would later describe the atomic bomb in similar terms.

It looked like a boiling up with every color of the rainbow.

As dark clouds formed overhead, sticky black rain began to fall.

It was later understood that the rain itself was radioactive.

Three days after Hiroshima, another atomic bomb was dropped.

This, on Nagasaki, by Major Sweeney himself.

"At 10:58 in the morning of August 9th,

the bomb was exploded above the city and in the towering mushroom,

Japan could read its doom.

This was more than a routine bombing, it was the funeral pyre of an aggressor nation."

"Now back to This is Your Life, rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto

in Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.

Time is standing still as our Earth shakes to an explosion never before equaled.

Now, you've never met him, you've never seen him, but he's here tonight to clasp your hand in friendship.

Cpt. Robert Lewis, USAF,

who along with Paul Tibbets piloted the plane from which the first

atomic power was dropped over Hiroshima.

Cpt. Lewis, come in here close, and would you tell us, sir,

of your experience on August 6, 1945?"

"As I've said before, Mr. Edwards, I wrote down later:

'My god, what have we done?'"

For many around the world, the attacks were more than justified.

They were comeuppance for the brutal atrocities committed by imperial Japan throughout Asia.

Yet, as in Japan's own wars, civilians were forced to pay the largest price.

In America, the iconography of the new weapon would take on bizarre and ghoulish proportions.

Admiral Spike Blandy and his wife

celebrated the detonation of a thermonuclear device

at Bikini Atoll, with an atomic bomb cake.

A high school in Richland, Washington adopted the a-bomb as their official mascot.

Church artists carved images of the Enola Gay and other WWII bombers in stained glass windows.

If the euphoria has faded over time, the rationale remains the same:

the nuclear option was the lesser evil.

Though the attacks killed hundreds of thousands of civilians,

the alternative was far worse.

A ground invasion would have taken millions of lives,

both Japanese and American.

This view is no longer tenable.

The US's own Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 states unequivocally that:

The National Archives in Washington chart Japanese peace overtures from as early as 1943,

and a cable sent on may 5th, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo

and intercepted by the US reveals that the Japanese were desperate

to sue for peace, including capitulation even if the terms were hard.

"We're going to destroy Japan's armies, Japan's navy,

Japan's air forces, Japan's war factories. Japan's whole power to wage war."

Far from being frightened of Japanese belligerence,

US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, told President Truman

he was fearful the Japanese would surrender before the new weapon could "show its strength".

In his diary, he frankly explained a different reason for the assault.

The bombs were dropped, in Stimson's words: "to persuade Russia to play ball".

Together, Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute not only the most violent act of warfare in history,

but also the most violent example of the psychological operation.

Terrorism, in the broadest definition, is any act that

targets civilians rather than military,

although some terrorist acts do target military, but

generally it's conceded to be targeting of civilians and non-combatants

with the purpose of defeating a society.
And there's a great deal of state violence

against people that are considered enemies of the state, that could be considered,

and should be considered terrorism.

However, the states define terrorism as acts of

either asymmetrical warfare where a less armed

and capable group is trying to have some influence, might even be self-defensive,

in using terrorist tactics in order to dissuade.

I think the human community avoids violence as much as possible

because of our memory of violence, and

when you chose violence, you're not only harming the person you're excusing(?) as the enemy, you're harming yourself.

And I think the human community knows that lesson, so

people will put up with a great deal of abuse before they go to violence.

Many things are called terrorism,

and many terrorist acts are exempted. However,

if people get to a point of despair or hopelessness,

and they feel there is no other way out and all other options have been tried, then a small segment of them

will win by arguing for violence, and for a period they'll get sanctuary and sanction and support

out of the larger group for the violence. But, once you restore justice

and restore hope, then those people

are no longer given that sanction and support.

That's really the only way out of the cycle.

To respond to terrorism with counter-terrorism and violence, in the end,

only creates more victims and more anger.

So, terrorism is one of these concepts, one of these terms, that's obviously

very important at the moment to elites in the West.

Now that, with the Cold War being over,

it's pretty much consensus that this is gonna be the thing that it's gonna replace it, the war on terror, global war on terror, blah blah blah.

So, you have to define terrorism, obviously, very carefully.

It has to be something that only they do and that we don't do

and that takes some pretty fancy footwork.

The way the term is generally used is something like Shock and Awe.

When it's carried out by non-state, low-tech groups.

So, in other words, elites in the West would prefer

that terrorism be something done generally by non-state groups,

though it can be backed by "terror" states, it can be backed by enemy states,

but generally they want to avoid

the idea of terrorism being attached to states,

even in the Axis of Evil, I think as a whole they would prefer that these evil states sponsor terrorism.

The notion that states can inherently be terroristic and use terroristic

methods is kind of dangerous, 'cause then it might come back to haunt us.

So, generally non-state, generally low-tech.

You know, and blowing yourself up in the marketplace and so on, is pretty low-tech too.

I said it was a form of Shock and Awe. What I meant by that is that

when we use the word terrorism,
we generally refer to an act of extreme violence,

which is meant to shock. It's not as if it shocks accidentally. It's meant to shock.

It's meant to create awe, and of course, fear. Terror, extreme fear,

and therefore to intimidate populations.

"The bombers took off from the Hornet in the early morning of the 18th of April, 1942.

They were about to fly into history.
But, first they set course for the Japanese mainland.

The bombing of Tokyo dealt a huge psychological blow to the Japanese,

and the man who had masterminded and led the raid, was the then-colonel Jimmy Doolittle."

In 1954, WWII general Jimmy Doolittle sent a secret report to president Eisenhower.

Speaking of the Cold War, he stated:

It would not be until the Vietnam War, that the American people

would become acquainted with the repugnant philosophy being promoted behind the scenes.

In the immediate post-WWII era, most of the public would be shielded

from the carnage committed in their name, by a compliant and compromised news media.

Yet hidden behind the facade of consumerism and nuclear family values,

was a relentless struggle of the issues of race, sex and class.

It would not only erupt in the homeland, but on a global scale,

leading to the deaths of millions of people at the hands of an increasingly powerful

and increasingly paranoid security apparatus.

"In Latin America there are various regimes which at the moment are abusing human rights:

political murder, torture, deportations, imprisonment without a trial,

using the techniques they may have learned in this establishment."

"Uh… You may be right.

If you can say that the skills which we've taught here have been applied, I can't deny that."

Throughout the Cold War, the School of the Americas

functioned as the primary training ground for the teaching of terrorism.

Based in Fort Benning, Georgia, the SOA, which is now known as WHINSEC,

has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen

since its inception in 1946.

Among its graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega of Panama,

Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina

and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia.

It has a new name, but is still known as the School of the Americas.

There are numerous graduates of the School of the Americas, numerous,

who have been involved in many of the worst acts of terrorism

in the western hemisphere in the past 50 years or so.

Classes on bomb making are called “How to defuse a bomb”

and it's the same with torture and assassination.

You have to know how to assassinate to avoid being assassinated yourself. Those are the covers.

"Torture techniques taught, from rape

to disrobing (?),

to torture with, with pointed objects,

breaking of extremities, poking eyes out, branding."

Most of the courses come around, revolve around what they call counter-insurgency warfare.

Who are the insurgents?

We have to ask that question. They are the poor.

They are the people in Latin America who call for reform.

They are the landless peasants who are hungry.

They are health-care workers, human rights advocates, labor organizers – they become the insurgents!

They are seen as el enemigo, "the enemy".

And they are those who become the targets

of those who learn their lessons at the School of the Americas.

A lesser known training facility for both foreign and domestic military and intelligence personnel is Harvey Point.

Described in official reports as an annex
to the CIA training base at Camp Peary, Virginia.

First used to train anti-Castro Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1960,

the NY Times later reported that Harvey Point has trained 18,000

foreign intelligence operatives from 50 different countries.

Among the individuals trained at the facility there've been: El Salvador’s death squad chief

Roberto D’Aubuisson,

Egypt's general intelligence directorate,

Colombian counter-insurgency personnel,

and (?), who would later join Osama Bin Laden’s forces

fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

According to former CIA officer Robert Baer, whose story was depicted

in the Hollywood film Syriana, the two weeks of trying at Point Harvey

was, for all purposes:

Among the techniques taught to new recruits is how to successfully install and remotely detonate a car bomb.

Just north of the training facility, is that of the mercenary group Blackwater,

now known as Academi.

These are children's drawings from El Salvador in the 1980s.

The drawings are disturbingly similar to those of Palestinian children in the Israeli occupied territories.

In 2005, a number of media reports suggested that the Pentagon was debating the “Salvador Option” for Iraq.

According to the NY Times magazine, the template for Iraq today is El Salvador,

where a right-wing government, backed by the US,

fought a leftist insurgency in a 12 year war, beginning in 1980.

The cost was high. More than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians,

in a country with a population of just 6 million.

Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army

and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it.

Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.

As part of president Reagan's policy of supporting anti-communist forces,

hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid was funneled to the Salvadorian army.

And a team of 55 special forces advisers, led for several years by James Steele,

trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses.

Using the doctrine of plausible deniability,

few Americans were directly involved in the actual killing of Salvadorian civilians.

This was not the case, however, in Vietnam.

Operation Phoenix – this was a brainchild of a William Colby who was, at that time,

a senior CIA official in the US occupied region of South Vietnam,

later became director of the CIA. What they would do is,

the CIA would go out and use their contacts in various Vietnamese regions

and say: "OK, who were the Viet Cong?"

which was a derogatory term of that era.

"Who are the Viet Cong in your neighborhood?"

and "Here, let me fill in this form of what you have to say."

The forms go back to a data center. The data gets entered into the primitive computers as they existed

in 1968, 1969, 1970 – this was way before PCs –

get cranked through the computer, and out comes a list of people's names

and their cousins’ names, their wives’ names, their kids’ names.

Well, is the kid over here, in some other region,

where he's getting turned in by somebody else?

Bingo! So the father and the kid, two regions, both getting turned in as alleged Viet Cong.

Now what do we do? Well, we do two things.

Sometimes, they go and capture them and try to turn them into double agents.

More often what they did is go and try to identify them, and kill them.

And by the Agency's own accounting, at least 20,000 people were killed in this fashion.

"And it got to be where, it was like someone would say: "Ok", you know,

"you come stay on my farm and you can go hunting everyday for free and I'll give you all the ammo you want,

and you can hunt and there's no limit, you can all go out together and just hunt", you know? It was like a hunting trip.

And the more people we killed, the happier our officers were, you know?

It got to be like a game, like the object was to see who could kill the most people

and the different ways you could prove how many people you killed would be like cutting off their ears,

now, if you brought back someone's ears, you know? Pretty likely, you had to kill them to get them.

And then people would, you know, whoever had the most ears,

they would get the most beers. And you trade your ears for beers."

That's a style of warfare that has,

in new forms, been picked up in Central America, in the US

intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador. In Nicaragua

it wasn’t a direct intervention, it didn’t send in the Marines.

What they did, is they hired a proxy force called the Contras.

In El Salvador, again, they didn’t send in the Marines, what they did

was sponsor a political faction

in that country's government and in that country's military,

equipped them with these tools, basically the same framework of collecting rumors about people,

compiling the rumors, cross-referencing the rumors and then using that to support death squads.

Today, you got the same situation in Afghanistan. You got the same situation,

was a major part of this so-called surge in Iraq.

In Latin America, the victims became known as Desaparecidos.

The first Desaparecidos, which means people who disappeared,

that had been documented, began in Guatemala in 1950s

where by the state mobilized its resources to kidnap people,

usually the middle of the day, in the streets, in schools, workplace,

who were believed to have communist or socialist ideology

or just to sympathize with, you know, organizations

that were perceived to be communist.

And I think it was in the mid ‘80s that I coined this phrase 'The Third World War’

because in my research I realized that we were not attacking

the Soviet Union and the CI's activities, we were attacking people in the third world,

and I'm gonna just quickly, in the interest of time, just give you a little sense of what that means, this ‘Third World War’.

Basically, it's the third, I believe, in terms of loss of life and human destruction,

the third bloodiest war in all of history.

They undertake and run operations in every corner of the globe.

They also undertook the license of operating just

totally above and beyond US laws, they had a license, if you will, ‘to kill’,

but also they took that to a license to smuggle drugs,

a license to do all kinds of things to other people

in other societies in violation of international law, our law

and every principle of nations working together for a healthier and more peaceful world.

Meanwhile, again, they battled to convert the US legal system

in such a way that it would give them control of our society.

Now, we have massive documentation of what they call "The Secret wars of the CIA",

we don’t have to guess or speculate, we had the Church Committee investigate them in 1975,

gave us our first really in-depth powerful look inside this structure.
Senator Church said,

in the 14 years before he did his investigation,

that he'd found they had run 900 major operations and 3,000 minor operations.

And if you extrapolate that over the whole period of the 40-odd years that we've had the CIA,

you come up with 3,000 major operations and over 10,000 minor operations.

Every one of them illegal,

every one of them disruptive of the lives and societies of other peoples,

and many of them bloody and gory beyond comprehension almost.

They have played a key role in helping other governments pick their police intelligence agencies, including,

we've learned, the Korean CIA, Urugayan national police.

Can you tell us about this?"

"No."

If he appeared in a Hollywood thriller, he would be called

a serial killer with sadistic personality disorder.

As it happened, he worked for the State Department.

Dan Mitrione has become the poster child for American torture during the Cold War.

Head of the Orwellian-named Office of Public Safety

in Montevideo, Urugay,

he was so enthusiastic about torture that he gave live demonstrations.

His M.O. was to kidnap homeless people off the streets

and demonstrate torture techniques to a rapt audience of military officials.

Reportedly, four homeless men died as a result of Mitrione’s demonstrations.

Former Urugayan chief of police intelligence, Alejandro Otero,

explained that Mitrione had instituted torture as a matter of routine.

Among Mitrione’s recommendations were the adoption of new psychological techniques,

such as playing a tape in next room of women and children screaming,

while informing the prisoner that the voices belong to those of his family.

In some cases, no recording was necessary.

An investigation by the Urugayan Senate concluded that during the US-backed reign of terror,

pregnant women were subjected to various brutalities and inhumane treatment,

while certain women were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the same treatment.

Similar patterns emerged across the globe.

In Guatemala, a roman-catholic nun named Dianna Ortiz

was raped and tortured in presence of an American consultant.

"For 24 hours she was tortured and gang-raped.

During her ordeal, she identified the leader of the gang

as a fellow citizen of the US."

"I came out a totally different person,

but also with new eyes and

more attune to the hurting, the brokenness, the oppression,

the deceit of my government.

I’ve heard people say that what happened in Abu Ghraib

is an isolated incident

and I have to just shake my head and say, you know, are we on the same planet?

Aren’t you aware of our history?

Isn’t history taught in the classroom about

the role of the US government in human rights violations?

Just as they had done with the tactic of assassination,

the CIA was good enough to provide a manual for their proxy forces on the use of torture.

Widely known as KUBARK, the title is actually a Cold War cryptonym for the CIA itself.

One passage states: "Deprivation of stimuli induces regression

by depriving the subject’s mind of contact with the outer world

and thus forcing it in upon itself.

As the interrogate slips back from maturity toward a more infantile state

his learned or structured personality traits fall away."

Dan Mitrione was eventually kidnapped and killed by (?-*) forces.

Incredibly, he was not tortured in turn.

After his death, Mitrione was declared an American hero.

A benefit for his wife included performances by Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis.

Decades later, the television show 24

would immortalize one of Mitrione’s innovations,

pretending that a man’s loved ones are being tortured in an adjacent room.

"I know who you are.

I know everything that you’ve done. Where is the bomb?

WHERE’S THE BOMB?

You are wasting my time.

Those men will kill your family if you don’t tell me where the bomb is now.

I despise you for making me do this

Once again, the torturer would be cast as a hero,

but in this case, new cover up of his activities was necessary.

Jack Bauer was a hero precisely because

he was willing to engage in the most despicable act of which a human being is capable.

In 2012, the propaganda of torture would reach its peak.

"I’m not your friend. I’m not gonna help you.

I’m gonna break you.

Any questions?"

Zero Dark Thirty, a collaborative project between the CIA

and Academy Award winning filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow,

falsely indicated that torture had been responsible for locating Osama Bin Laden.

Upon its release, even Acting CIA Director Michael Morell

was forced to admit that:

Torture is something that I never thought that I would be very much interested in or involved in.

It’s strange credulity that we should be discussing whether torture should be

allowed or encouraged by our government.

About 6-7 years ago, a radio producer

called me up, said: “Mr. McGovern, we're gonna have a

little colloquium on torture, 20 minutes,

10 for you – we know where you stand on torture - and 10 for any advocates of torture,

for the other side.”

And I said, the other side? He said: “Oh yea, there’s so many things that torture’s, you know…”

I said: There's another side? (laughter).

I wanted to say: “Well, bring them on!” you know, but that’s already been used, they didn’t want to use that.

So, when I got off the phone I said to myself: “Ray,

I guess, get over your shot, man, some people really think it’s OK,

so take some, take 10 minutes out” – he was gonna call back in 10 minutes –

“figure out what you’re going to say about torture.”

It gives the country bad name.

It endangers our own troops.

Brutalizes people. You know, all you need to do

is talk to people coming back from Abu Ghraib, as I have,

see that not only were those tortured brutalized,

but the people who were ordered or permitted or encouraged to do the torture, also brutalized.

It doesn’t work! Torture doesn’t work.

What was really, really telling, was that

when George Bush decided to make his big speech

on September 6, 2006,

advertising the merits of what he called

an alternative set of procedures,

read: harsh interrogation techniques, okay?

On that very day, the head of army intelligence,

Admiral John- I’m sorry, General John Kimmons

decided he’d have his own press conference in the Pentagon

and he released what was the new army manual on torture. OK?

You know what he said? This is a direct quote:

“No good intelligence has ever come from harsh interrogation techniques.

History has proved this

and the empirical experience of the last 5 years,

hard years, have also proved this."

If torture does not produce reliable intelligence, as all credible experts insist,

the question remains as to why governments bother to use the tactic at all?

One possible answer is that torture is a highly effective method of eliciting

fake confessions that serve to justify state policy.

Omar Suleiman, who served as Egypt’s torturer-in-chief for US rendition programs

managed to extract a confession by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

that Iraq was linked to Al-Qaeda operatives

and that they were training in the deployment of chemical and biological weapons.

“And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

“No question, we have said that Saddam Hussein possesses biological and chemical weapons.”

"We know where they are, they’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."

Later, a child soldier named Omar Khadr, originally hailing from Canada,

would be convicted by so called “evidence” obtained through torture.

The events have a disturbing historical parallel.

The show-trials of the Soviet Union portrayed hapless former party officials

admitting to counter-revolutionary activities.

Confessions obtained through torture.

Slansky was charged with titoism, spying and sabotage.

His confession was fiction, drafted by Soviet advisers.

Another answer to the question of why torture is practiced is that it, is itself a form of terrorism.

There have been societies in the past, of course,

and still some today, which practice torture regularly

and don’t particularly hide it, it’s just part of how the state

carries out its functions. And there are also non-state societies that have used it.

It has various purposes, one of them is to intimidate, usually, and

to give the message to people: “This is who we are, this is what we can do to you.”

And the narrative of freedom, you know, the US not only treasures freedom for its own people,

but is also the liberator of other people. So it goes to Afghanistan to liberate Afghan women and

the population in general from repressive autocratic fundamentalists.

And it goes to Iraq because this tyrant is there, and so on - so this is a liberation narrative.

It’s a narrative of benevolence,

and it’s very dangerous, therefore, to have too much of this overt massacre and torture happening.

And yet, there’s always been, along with this ‘liberator narrative’,

a kind of secondary narrative, a little bit, just a little bit in the wings.

A little bit repressed, but very much there.

And that’s the old one, that war makers insist on,

it’s part of their power, and it is the same one that I mentioned before:
“This is who we are and this is what we can do to you.”

What I see happening now is a shift,

I see that the narrative that was in the background, (?) before,

is now moving to the foreground.

So yea, we knew that they were training torturers in the School of the Americas and that

the US was implicated in all this stuff, but they were always trying to say: “No, no. We’re one step removed.

These guys are out of control.

We wouldn’t directly get our American hands dirty. We don’t do the wet work.”

I think it’s an important shift and I think it shows the cracks

that are developing in the imperium here.

That we don’t have legitimate institutions,

we don’t have the love and affection, the trust,

we don’t have the credibility, we don’t have any of those things that most governments aspire to have.

Therefore, we must rule through naked aggression and by inducing fear in you.

And that is what the US is starting to resort to, now that’s very tricky,

because it’s pretty well known

that these acts of, for example torture,

when you torture people and you drop bombs on them and you do ‘shock and awe’ on them,

and this is even recognized, by the way, in the ‘shock and awe’ documents, military documents – they recognize this:

You can induce obedience and awe and fear and so,

but you could also induce resistance, disgust, revulsion,

anger and uprising in people. This is the danger you always take,

this is the danger that all tyrants court

when they try to rule through naked fear.
It’s very fragile – the power is very fragile.

As it turns out, WWII General Jimmy Doolittle’s memo to President Eisenhower,

claiming that the US would have to abandon “traditional American notions of fair play” was based more on myth than reality.

Notably absent from most mainstream histories of the US,

though not military manuals, is the concept of “Total War”.

According to this strategy, attacks against civilians and their infrastructure

are not only fair game, they are a vital component of the war effort as a whole.

In the US, Total War was employed against indigenous populations with genocidal results.

Similar techniques would also be adopted against Filipinos in the late 19th century.

During the 20th century, new technologies would permit a new and monstrous efficiency in the targeting of civilians.

"After 5 years of killing, the gears of the Vietnam death machine

were grinding more slowly in the months before the invasion of Cambodia."

"Almost all restraint is off. For the first time, the Vietnamese are seeing the holocaust of conventional war.

The kind that leveled much of Korea and destroyed dozens of cities in WWII."

"Women. Children. Babies. Some are dead, some are not dead.

"By evening", government spokesmen are saying,
"another grand victory has been won in Quang Tri province.

The situation is once again stabilized."
But there will be more fighting and more words.

Words spoken by generals, journalists, politicians.

But here on Route 1, it’s difficult to imagine what those words can be.

There’s nothing left to say about this war.

There’s just nothing left to say.

Bob Simon, CBS news, Route 1.

In the wake of Vietnam, American policy planners were faced with a problem.

It was called “The Vietnam Syndrome”

and related to a wide-spread disgust by American citizens over the mass slaughter committed in their name.

Now, the problem for Reagan was twofold.

We’ve had just come out of Vietnam War

and public opinion in the US was overwhelmingly opposed

to US military interventions abroad,

mainly because of the high loss of lives

and the hundreds of thousands of wounded

American soldiers and the traumatic experiences they had,

what some commentators called “The Vietnam Syndrome”

that Washington should refrain

from military operations outside of the territorial US.

In order to reverse “The Vietnam Syndrome”, a new model developed.

It involved an economic, rather than overt, conscription program,

as well as intense media censorship of the casualties of war.

The public would be taught that modern warfare was a clinical exercise, mostly devoid of civilian casualties,

even as the opposite became true.

Much of the misconception regarding civilian casualties, owes to highly deceptive reportage by the media.

What we really have is a military-industrial-media complex in the US,

and to say that is that there’s been a concentration of media.

When Project Censored started 32 years ago,

there were 50 major media corporations in the US, actually a little bit more, probably closer to 60.

And in that time, we’ve come down now to 10 major companies.

You know, you’ve got the big television companies

with the 24 hour news: MSNBC and Fox and CNN,

and that’s where most people are getting their news. So, that’s very limited.

And then you’ve got the NY Times, The Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, are the big papers.

It’s very concentrated and very narrow.

We have 10 major companies now that dominate the news in the US
It’s very concentrated and very narrow.

We have 10 major companies now that dominate the news in the US

and are the suppliers of the ideas and the understandings that

the American people have access to.

The board directors of the 10 big media groups could

fit in a medium sized classroom, we’re only talking about a 120 people or so,

and they all pretty much know each other.

They, in turn, sit on the boards of directors of like 20% of the corporate 1,000.

So, they’re on big corporation boards in addition to being on media boards.

What we’ve seen since 9/11 is a real penetration

from the military-industrial companies, the military companies, the top 10,

on the boards of directors of media firms.
You’ve got this, really in-depth penetration between

the military companies, the ones that are so profitable since 9/11, I mean, we’re seeing

300% increase in profits for Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman values their stock,

that occurred, and literally capturing billions of dollars of

money because of war,

and then having people write - sitting on the boards of the big media companies.

"It is a 2,000 pound bomb that is deadly accurate

and that is the thing that is allowing us, that allowed us in Afghanistan and will allow us in this next conflict

to be terribly accurate, terribly precise and terribly destructive."

"To see that military targets are destroyed, to be sure,

but that it’s done in a way, in a manner, and in a

destruct- in a direction and with a weapon

that is appropriate to that very particularized target.

The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision

that no one ever dreamt of."

Well, there’s a saying that first casualty of war is the truth, and that’s true.

Whether any country uses propaganda,

first of all on its own citizens,

to get into a war and make sure the public supports the war,

and then on the enemy, to feed the enemy.

Wars are filled with propaganda terms like friendly fire.

I hate that term. What it means is,

we killed one of our own soldiers.

Friendly fire sounds like, you know, let’s get out the marshmallows and the S’mores.

Or, we now have bombs that are “smart” bombs

and so, they don’t cause collateral damage.

What does that even mean, smart bombs and collateral damage?
It means that

when you’re bombing Baghdad, you’re killing civilians.
There’s no way around it.

That’s collateral damage. It sounds like something in an insurance policy, you know, it helps us not really think of what’s going on.

The idea of the military being able to show footage

from a nose cone of some missile entering a window and

blowing up a building, well obviously that’s a pretty smart bomb, because it just got in there and got “the bad guys”.

I mean, “the bad guys” is sort of a post 9/11 term

that’s right out of, you know, all the cowboy movies of the 20th century.

The lone ranger was always after “the bad guys”. John Wayne was always out to get “the bad guys”.

We’re often led to believe that this is another one of these binary systems, you know,

in other words, we have a choice.

Killing is either intentional or it’s unintentional, and unintentional means somehow accidental.

That’s what we’re often being told by our leaders.

And that terrorists do the first. They kill intentionally.

And when I say kill, I mean, kill innocent people intentionally. Kill civilians and kids and stuff.

We, on the other hand, unfortunately, sometimes do that, but

it’s always unintentional, it’s accidental, it’s not what we’re really trying to do.

I think my response to that is twofold.
In terms of intention, this is a false binary.

If you look at legal systems around the world,

you find that they recognize that for something,

to talk about murder, for example, most legal systems will say you have more than A killing B,

which is a physical act. You also have to have a certain mental state.

In Latin, mens rea, means guilty mind.

And then there are discussions and distinctions and divisions

in legal systems to what this guilty mind wound involve,

and it doesn’t have to necessarily involve twirling your handlebar moustache and saying:

“I’m gonna kill 500,000 kids in Iraq.”

But, in our legal system we recognize there can be a guilty mind without that degree of intentionality.

So, there are concepts of criminal negligence, there are concepts of doing something knowingly, rather than unknowingly,

concepts of recklessness, concepts of so-and-so knew or should have known,

should have reasonably known that their action would cause this death.

There are at least 4 levels of distinction in this idea of the guilty mind,

and we should keep this in mind because it isn’t a question of on one hand twirling your handlebar moustache,

or, somehow, it’s an accident.

There’s all these possibilities in between. So, for example, if somebody says: “Well,

my intention was not to kill anybody. I was hungry, there was a hot dog stand,

I saw there was only one hot dog left,

so I drove my Humvee there as quickly as I could. Yes, I ran over 18 people,

you know, because there was a crowd in front of the hot dog stand, but my intention was not to kill people, it was to have a hot dog!”

Well, okay, try that one and you’ll end up in jail for quite a while.

The second thing I want to do is talk about actual military strategy. Some people still think that,

“ah, the governments of the West would never do any kind of attack on civilians.”

Well, excuse me, that’s very naive.

Since at least Clausewitz, who was a theoretician of war in the early 1800s,

this idea of…

I mean, Clausewitz had this notion of, what he called “Centers of Gravity”.

It’s not enough to attack the army of your opponent.

You know, in a modern, industrial society it makes, at times, much more sense

to attack, for examples, their centers of production, industrial production.

Or their centers of production of information and propaganda, or whatever.

He called these “Centers of Gravity”. And this idea of the CoG, or “Center of Gravity” is still

very much alive in US, say, US Air Force doctrine.

And it’s recognized that a society will have certain centers of gravity which must be attacked.

You see this in attacks on Iraq, let’s say, 1991,

where the hydro-electric stations were targeted.

They obviously were vital to the health of the society.

They were vital to maintaining pure water, for example. Sewage system, water purification system.

So, when you talk about that they only used precision guided munitions, the question is:

yeah, but if they used them to knock out those mechanisms for maintaining

health in the society, then obviously they are destroying that health and they know they are.

And they even talk about targeting it at times.

A study called "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities"

was produced for the US military and the UK military,

it is dated January, sometime January 1991, so the sanctions have been going on for some months, since August,

against Iraq, but the actual armed attack had not quite yet begun.

And the study concludes that
“Iraq’s water purification system is in deep trouble

because of the sanctions. Iraq”, the document says very clearly,

“will not be able to repair these systems

as long as the sanctions that now exist are in place.”

And it says, “it’s already in deep disrepair and it’s going to get worse.

We can expect the following epidemic diseases to break out”,
and then they list them.

We know they received the document, January 1991, so what did they do?

Well, they attacked Iraq and they made
water purification and sewage treatment

even worse, much worse, in fact, than they had been when the document was…

They destroyed some of these systems directly and in other cases, rendered them inoperative indirectly –

through knocking out hydro-electric stations.

And then they maintained this system in this hopeless state of disrepair

for the next 10 years or so.

So, a reasonable estimate is that 500,000 kids

in Iraq that would otherwise be alive, died during that period.

Not all from diarrhoeal diseases, but a substantial number.

And it was known, and a study had been done. Everything was in place, now

So what do we do at that?

Was there a group of military officers sitting around Washington and saying:

“Let’s kill 500,000 Iraqi kids!”?

Don’t know. Probably not.

But they were in full control of the situation, knew what was happening in every stage.

So they did it knowingly. And they would certainly,

if this had been a domestic crime,

be considered to have mens rea, you know, the guilty mind

and certainly be considered responsible.

To top it all off, we have a publication in which a US military officer brags

about the fact that they created, I think he calls it “a public health crisis”

in Iraq through these sorts of methods.

So, not only did we do it, not only did we know we were doing it,

but we celebrated. We regard it as a legitimate way of fighting war.

Despite the fact, that of course, it’s against the Fourth Geneva Convention.

This is what’s being done. This is the kind of thing that’s being done pretty regularly now

through high-tech modern warfare by so called “democracies”.

And the actual agent of destruction may be a precision guided missile, it doesn’t matter,

if the point of it is to ruin the health of a population, the civilian population.

"We have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more

children than died when… in Hiroshima.

You know, is the price worth it?"

"I think this is a very hard choice, but the price,
we think, the price is worth it."

Closely related to the practices of torture and Total Warfare is the concept of demonstrative violence.

In the Phillippines, during the Huk insurrection, the CIA’s Ed Lansdale

would use brutal violence as a form of PSYWAR.

A later US army PSYWAR pamphlet explicitly refers to Lansdale’s techniques,

advocating:

In Indonesia, under various US-backed dictatorships, the idea of demonstrative violence

would again take on genocidal proportions.

As a PSYWAR tactic, the bodies of men, women and children

were dumped in rivers and kept afloat as a warning to the population at large.

To make sure they didn’t sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to,

or impaled on, bamboo stakes.

The rivers literally ran red with blood.

Like psychological warfare itself, demonstrative violence is as old as civilization.

One of the most brutal forms would also become the symbol of one of the world’s great religions.

Crucifixions were not only a means of torture and execution, but a demonstration to other would-be rebels.

In this clip from a documentary on Alexander the Great,

colonel Lance Petros discusses the power of demonstrative violence:

"Alexander’s attitude toward defiance was ‘either join me, or die’."

"Alexander begins what would become the longest and most brutal siege of his campaign.

After 7 grueling months, when the walls are finally breached.

7,000 Tyrions are killed and 30,000 enslaved.

To prove a point to other cities that might resist,

he has 2,000 Tyrion fighters crucified.”

"When he was finished, he allowed the bloodlust of his men to run loose

and killed every, virtually every male inhabitant of the fortress.

It was an awful display of brutality,

but it was also very effective in showing to any other potential

enemies what could happen if they resisted."

Just as Alexander made an example of Tyre, the American army would make an example of Fallujah.

On March 31st, 2004, four mercenaries working for Blackwater, USA,

were captured and killed by the Iraqi resistance

and their bodies dragged through the streets.

What followed was one of the greatest war crimes in modern history.

Sealing off Fallujah and forcing adult males and teenage boys to remain,

over half of the entire city was raised to the ground.

"We were told going in to Fallujah, to the combat area,

that every single person that was walking, talking, breathing,

was an enemy combatant.

As such, every single person that was walking on the street or into the house was a target."

Just as the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam

would lead to explosion in cancer rates and birth defects,

the use of white phosphorous and other munitions

have produced similar results in cities like Fallujah.

A study from July 2010, showed a 12-fold increase

in childhood cancer in the city.

It also reported that an incredible 14.7% of children

are now born with birth defects,

more than 14 times the figure recorded for Hiroshima.

In a grim irony, shortly after the Fallujah Study was released,

Wired Magazine revealed that the US military

was teaching its officers at the Joint Forces Staff College

to use “Hiroshima tactics” and wage a “Total war on Islam”.

Arabs who resist occupation with armed self-defense,

or conversely, adopt the tactics of their oppressors

by engaging in acts of terrorism

are widely portrayed as being motivated by religion.

Yet, an actual study of the subject came to the opposite conclusion.

The study was conducted at the University of Chicago’s project on security and terrorism.

Among other revelations, it revealed that more than 95% of

all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, not religion.

"Bachmann and four of her republican colleagues are demanding an investigation into

potential infiltration by Muslim Brotherhood operatives

intent on destroying western civilization."

"Containing dangerous muslims, that is the subject of this evening’s Talking Points Memo."

"It’s a frightening thought, Islamic terrorist training camps

right here in America in our backyards!"

"So, we made it through the holidays without a terrorist attack, but

it doesn’t mean we can ever let our guard down, because our enemies are persistent

and they’re patient.

Could the hundreds of mosques in America be fronts for terror training?"

"Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim."

"And said ‘there’s a menace tonight. You’ve upset a billion of us. You should watch out.’

That’s what it- ‘and we’re gonna try and move in

to your city and your country and we’re gonna raise more and more demands.’ That’s what’s meant by it."

"Would you grant me this, that as long as there is an Israel in the world,

and I’m a big supporter of Israel, and as long as America backs it,

the kind of Muslims that take their religion that seriously that they would strap on a

suicide belt are always going to be out for us and always going to try to kill us?"

"And the thing that worries me the most in the world is radical Islam, obviously,

and increasingly, might I add, moderate Islam."

The overarching narrative regarding Islam vs. the West was given pseudo-intellectual justification

by Samuel Huntington, a member of the elite Trilateral Commission,
via his book The Clash of Civilizations.

It’s as a very brief and rather crudely articulated manual in the art of maintaining

a war-time status in the minds of Americans and others,

that Huntington’s work has to be now understood.

I go so far as saying that it argues from a standpoint of Pentagon planners

and defense industry executives

who may have temporarily lost their occupations after the end of the Cold War, but have now discovered a new vocation for themselves.

But few people today with any sense

would want to volunteer such sweeping characterizations as the ones advanced by Lewis about

a billion - a billion Muslims

scattered through five continents, dozens of differing languages and traditions and histories.

Of them all, Lewis says that they are all enraged at Western modernity.

As if a billion people were really only one person

and Western civilization was no more complicated a matter than a simple declarative sentence.

There is a similar debate inside the Islamic world today,

which in the often hysterical outcry about the threat of Islam, Islamic fundamentalism

and terrorism that one encounters so often in the media, is often lost sight of completely.

Like any other major world culture, Islam contains within itself an astonishing variety

of currents and counter-currents.
I would say that it is this extremely widespread attitude

of questioning and skepticism towards age-old authority that characterizes the post World War

in both east and west. And it’s that that Huntington cannot handle, and therefore,

resorts to the business of next clash of cultures, or the clash of civilizations.

What is described as Islam belongs to the discourse of Orientalism,

a construction fabricated to whip up feelings

of hostility and antipathy against a part of the world that happens to be of strategic importance for its oil,

its threatening adjacence to Christianity, its formidable history of competition with the West.

Yet this is a very different thing, than what to Muslims who live within its domain, Islam really is.

There’s a world of difference between Islam in Indonesia and Islam in Egypt.

But the truly weakest part, and I conclude here, the weakest part of the clash of cultures and civilizations thesis

is the rigid separation assumed between them despite

the overwhelming evidence that today’s world is, in fact,

a world of mixtures, of migrations and of crossings over, of boundaries traversed.

There are no insulated cultures or civilizations.

Any attempt made to separate them into the watertight compartments alleged

by Huntington and his ilk does damage to their variety,

their diversity, their sheer complexity of elements, their radical hybridity.

The more insistent we are on the separation of the cultures,

the more inaccurate we are about ourselves and about others.

Our most precious asset in the face of such a dire transformation of history

is the emergence not of a sense of clash,

but a sense of community, understanding, sympathy, and hope,

which is the direct opposite of what Huntington provokes.

The language of group identity makes a particularly strident appearance from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century

as the culmination of decades of international competition

between the great European and American powers for territories in Africa and Asia.

In the battle for the empty spaces of Africa, the so called Dark Continent,

France and Britain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal,

resort not only to force but to a whole slew of theories and rhetorics for justifying their plunder.

Perhaps the most famous of such devices is a French notion of the civilizing mission

– la mission civilizatrice –

a notion underlying which is the idea that some races and cultures have a higher aim in life than others.

This gives the more powerful, the more developed, the more civilized, the higher,

the right to colonize others, not in the name of brute force, or plunder,

both of which are standard components of the exercise,

but in the name of a noble ideal.

Conrad’s most famous story, The Heart of Darkness,

is an ironic, even terrifying enactment of this thesis that, as the narrator puts it,

“the conquest of the Earth which mostly means the taking it away from those have a different complexion,

a slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

What redeems it, is the idea. An idea at the back of it,

not a sentimental pretense but an idea,

and an unselfish belief in the idea, something you can bow down before and sacrifice to.”

In response to this sort of logic two things occur.

One is that competing imperial powers invent their own theory of cultural destiny

in order to justify their actions abroad.

Britain had such a theory, Germany had one, Belgium had one and of course, in the concept of Manifest Destiny,

the United States had one too.

These redeeming ideas

dignify the practice of competition and clash,

whose real purpose, as Conrad quite accurately saw, was self aggrandizement,

power, conquest, treasure and unrestrained self-pride.

The second thing that happens is that the lesser peoples,

the objects of the imperial gaze, so to speak;

respond by resisting their forcible manipulation and settlement.

Pride of place, in this practice, is given to compassion

and it is an arresting fact that right across the board in every single one

of the major world faiths,

compassion, the ability to feel with the other

in the way we’ve been thinking about this evening

is the, not only the test of any true religiousity,

it is also what will bring us into the presence of what

Jews, Christians and Muslims call God or the Divine.

It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to nirvana.

Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves

from the center of our world and we put another person there.

Once we get rid of ego, then we’re ready to see the divine.

And in particular, every single one of the major world traditions

has highlighted and has put at the core of their tradition what’s become known as the golden rule.

First propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ:

“do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you”,

that, he said, was the central thread which ran through

all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day,

and it was the golden rule would bring them to transcendent value that he called “ren”.

Human heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself.

And this is absolutely crucial to the monotheisms, too.

There’s a famous story about a great rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus,

a pagan came to him and offered to convert to Judaism

if the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg.

Hillel stood on one leg and said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.

That is the Tora, the rest is commentary.”

And this is an important point, I think, that you could not and must not

confine your compassion to your own group,

your own nation, your own co-religioness, your own fellow countrymen.

You must have what one of the Chinese sages call ren’ai – concern for everybody.

Love your enemies, honor the stranger.

We formed you, says the Quran, into tribes and nations, so that you may know one another.

And this again, this universal outreach,

is getting subdued in the strident use of religion,

abuse of religion for nefarious gains.

Make no mistake about it, religion is a kind of fault line,

and when a conflict gets engrained in a region,

religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem.

"Extremism is when

you do not allow

for a different point of view

and when you

hold

your view as being quite exclusive."

"On August 18th, at the Ramada Hotel in central Jerusalem,

leading Israeli rabbis gathered to defend a publication of a book by one of their peers

that cited rabbinic sources to justify the killing of non-Jews,

including innocent children and families."

"There is no salvation in hell,

there’s no savior in hell, there’s no Bible in hell,

there’s no blood in hell, there’s no altars in hell,

there’s no forgiveness in hell, whatever goes to hell, stays in hell!"

"Satan, be gone!"

Like all religions, Islam has its share of extremists.

Yet, far from opposing such groups, the major western powers have frequently supported them.

The most notorious case remains Saudi Arabia, where people are routinely beheaded for crimes such as sorcery and witchcraft.

In 2011, the Obama administration and the Saudis conducted the biggest arms deal in history.

Islamic fundamentalists have consistently been empowered by the West,

both as a “divide and conquer” stratagem,

and as a means of countering secular nationalist regimes

which threaten control of oil supplies.

This has been seen most recently in the proxy wars against Syria and Libya,

where NATO backed islamists have caused thousands of deaths.

"About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and

Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff

who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to

come in and talk to me a second.” I said,
“Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says,

“We’ve made the decision, we’re going to war with Iraq.”

This was on or about the 20th of September.

I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?”

He said, “I don’t know.” (laughter)

So I came back to see him a few weeks later,

and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.”

He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said,

he said “I just got this down from upstairs”
— meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office —

“today.” And he said,
“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out

seven countries in five years,

starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon,

Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.""

"Go through the countries again."

"Well, starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia and Sudan, and back to Iran."

The US would indeed attack Iraq,

but the people of Libya and Syria would have to wait until the next administration

to receive the gift of American democracy.

"Let’s get it done! Let’s arm these rebels. Let’s give them a chance to fight."

A sentiment also supported by MSNBC’s most liberal talk show host

Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell.

"It seems to me there’s a practical

war-making tactical success

that they believe they could have in this particular country."

"Exactly, he kept describing himself as sort of acutely aware of
that they believe they could have in this particular country."

"Exactly, he kept describing himself as sort of acutely aware of

the risks and the costs of America doing any sort of military intervention, so you’re exactly right."

"I think we have to do it. It is a moral decision at this point."

The headline from Reuters yesterday: President Barack Obama has signed a secret order

authorizing US support for rebels seeking to dispose Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad and his government.

A US government source acknowledged that under provisions of presidential finding,

the US is collaborating with a secret command center

operated by Turkey and its allies.

Last week, Reuters reported that along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar,

Turkey had established a secret base near the Syrian border to help direct vital military

and communications support to Assad’s opponents.

So, what you need to know: late last year, when Senator John McCain co-wrote the National Defense Authorization Act

and President Obama signed it into law,

they crafted a law that gave the President the authority to use all

necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict

with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and associated forces,

including the power to indefinitely detain anyone caught supporting Al-Qaeda,

which in this case, is the President and members of Congress.

To be clear, we’re spending over a trillion dollars,

and more importantly, spilling the blood of thousands of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan,

then spending more American money and military power to, in some cases,

help the same fighters overthrow another government.

For the most part, this began,

in the generic form, from around the 1960s, really took off,

where we had, in places like Egypt,

institutions like the Muslim Brotherhood

which were founded with the covert financial support of the CIA.

And this is very well documented, it’s not controversial anymore.

That doesn’t mean that organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood,

from top down, were simply, kind of, plants

from western intelligence services.

On the contrary, there were movements inside Egypt

which organically emerged as a result of struggles going on inside that country

with a combination of western interference, secularization,

the emergence of modernity, the struggle between kind of, traditional cultural ideas linked to Islam,

the sense of grievance that occurred in terms of British colonization and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire

and the way in which Muslims responded to that

across these different regions. So, all of these complex things

are what gave rise to these very different types of thinking.

But, certainly, the Muslim Brotherhood is an example where movements that were led by ideologues like Hassan al-Banna for example,

and Sayyd Qutb, who, I don’t think there’s any reason to think that these particular individuals were in any way, kind of, say, plants, for example.

But the ideas that they developed were given

financial mobilization and infrastructural support in a way that

probably wouldn’t have been possible without the input of

the United States and Britain and other Western European powers.

In the Middle East, you find that these virulent Islamist movements

were supported as a way of countering both independent nationalist movements,

as well as movements that were left-leaning.

This whole process basically accelerated when

US began to see Afghanistan as a major area of strategic influence,

and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security adviser to the Carter administration,

as well as Richard Helms, former director of the CIA, have both admitted that

they began intelligence interference and military intelligence operations in Afghanistan

before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was considered to be a gateway to Eurasia,

and Eurasia herself was also considered to be the basis for

maintaining US hegemony.
If you controlled Afghanistan, you could control Eurasia,

if you controlled Eurasia, you would control world order.

And this is simply because of, again: population, resources, geographic position.

So these are all very imperial considerations and Brzezinski actually articulated these ideas

very candidly in his book, The Grand Chessboard.

So, this was why we got involved in Afghanistan.

Well, in the process, we funded; and by we I mean the US, Britain,

again – western European powers, even elements of the Muslim world who were allies of the US: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan…

We funded these virulent, marginal groups

in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden was involved in this process.

He had connections with the CIA, he received funding from the CIA

to facilitate the establishment of the Tora Bora complex, for example.

"US national security adviser Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance.

He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America’s role.

On the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass he urged the “soldiers of god” to re-double their efforts."

"We know of their deep belief in God

and we are confident that their struggle will succeed."

This process continued throughout the first Cold War period

as a way of rolling back the Soviet Union.

It was paralleled, again, in the Middle East, where funding

of the same kinds of movements accelerated across the Middle East

in order to, basically – again – roll back the Soviet influence

or potential left-leaning interference in all of these countries.

In 1958, president Eisenhower

expressed – in internal discretion, since declassified –

concern about what he called a "campaign of hatred against us"

in the Arab world. Not by governments, but by the people.

The National Security Council explained, at the same time,

the reasons for it (this is the highest planning body):

they said there’s a perception in the Arab world that the US supports

dictatorships and blocks democracy and development,

and that we do that so as to ensure control over the resources of the region.

Furthermore, they went on to say that the perception is, basically, accurate

and that that's exactly what we should be doing

- relying on the Muasher Doctrine:

As long as people are quiet, everything is under control, it’s fine.

During the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles

summed up the dominant view amongst American strategic planners:

During the Cold War, the new state of Israel

was perceived as an important ally in the struggle against Arab independence.

And the Israelis had their own imperial ambitions.

You’re faced, in that sense, with a terrible predicament,

if you’re going to be a Zionist, and which is that you have to

conquer the land that you say God gave to you.

And the conquest will be rationalized by the sufferings that you have received and

the fact that you felt yourself divinely entitled to it.

Zionist movement goes back

really to the beginnings of the 19th century but it was only adopted by

Jews out of a conflict and a crisis that they had

towards the close of the 19th century.

And that set forth for the Jews

a choice, which was to develop a nationalism for themselves.

It wasn’t the only choice, I mean, a lot of other Jews decided

to become very pious and just go to the religious traditions

or they decided to go westward and

became very, very important in the history of the US immigration, or

they became very much involved with Marxist and socialist movements.

But there was this also fourth impulse which was to become

the bearer of an idea that they had to develop their nationalism.

Ben Gurion, and later Moshe Dayan, who was his Chief of Staff,

said: "Listen, if I were an Arab, I

would do everything possible to kick out the Jews.

But I’m a Jew, and we have this destiny and we’re going to take this country over."

The early Zionists were interested in this and they sent a couple of scouts to

study the situation and they cabled back,

in crypto language, but unmistakable, the following message:

"The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man."

The bride being the land that they sought for themselves,

and the marriage being the brood factor there were other people living there who had in fact inhabited that land. In fact,

these people whom we call Palestinians have, to some degree, inhabited it ever since

destruction of the Jewish temple back in 70 AD,

and they’re probably the descendents of the original Jews.

Whereas the Jews who came at the end of the 19th century and through the 20th century were mainly Jews

who developed in Eastern Europe or Russian territory.

Such is my own family, called the Ashkenazi Jews,

and we certainly had the religion but there was no actual authentic national rootedness.

And to take it over required ethnic cleansing. It’s built into the logic, it’s an iron necessity.

It can wax, it can wane, it can take legal forms, it can take administrative forms, it can take economic forms,

and then, of course, in 1947 and 48,
took terroristic and military forms, and became

the great Nakba, which is the catastrophe of Palestinian existence when

800,000 Palestinians were violently expelled, 531 villages were destroyed,

the memory of those villages was erased, and the like.

So that’s the foundational event which happens to have been a crime.

Of course, it’s a crime to take somebody else’s land and that’s the essence of the matter.

The imbalance is incredible – it’s a 100 to 1 basically,

and yet, somehow, it’s possible, given this kind of matrix that

– the history of being persecuted for being Jewish in anti-Semitic societies –

so all these fears can be

called and drummed up, and

the strident government propaganda saying:
“We’re defending the integrity of the state of Israel”,

so a lot of… You know, it’s amazing how people can

turn the truth on its head and believe that they are in fact the victim

of a force, namely the Palestinians.

I think Palestinians have very remarkable qualities, those chiefly being able to endure

the punishment that’s been meted out to them. It’s incredible that they’re as forgiving and as

benign a people as, in fact, they are. I know many, many Palestinians and they are remarkable in a lack of vengeance.

Of course, they have their anger and their little sects

within them and some of them will do terrible things, cause that’s human beings.

But in any sense that this is a real threat to the state of Israel

is just in the realm of madness and delusion.

All governments have to justify what they’re doing, they have to become legitimate and the like,

and the worse they behave, the more strenuously they have to

lie and distort reality in order to be legitimate.

And this is what they’re doing and they somehow succeeded through

a sustained propaganda campaign to

persuade the majority of Israeli citizens that the Palestinians were the aggressors

and a genuine threat to the state of Israel, which is absolute nonsense.

State-structured racism – I mean, the racism is profound and it is necessary,

given the basic logic

of the social compact of the basic structure of the state, so

it is impossible to avoid.

So, not only is it unavoidable, but it’s inevitably going to get worse

and is getting worse all the time.

There’s more racism in Israel, sociologically measured against the Palestinians,

the IDF, Israel Army

is increasingly violent against Palestinians in all respects

and the situation does not resolve and is heading towards

an extremely calamitous outcome, well it’s calamitous even in itself now.

In the 21st century, an increasing number of Jews are demanding a just peace with the Palestinians,

yet the Israeli government remains committed to war and expansion.

What are the roots of the war on terror, as a concept?

It was actually invented by Benjamin Netanyahu

who then became the Prime Minister of Israel in 1979.

Netanyahu had called a conference

on international terrorism,

and he coined the phrase “international terrorism” in 1979.

Bush Sr. who was then head of the CIA and George Shultz,

who later became Secretary of State were at this conference.

At that conference Netanyahu and Shimon Perez

and most of the other presenters – including Bush – proposed, essentially,

the war on terror policies which would characterize

liberation, resistance groups, anti-colonial resistance groups as terrorists.

For Netanyahu it was the PLO

and it was Arabs and Palestinians who were to be characterized as terrorists.

"Listen to the sound of Al’Thar!"

For Bush, it was the Sandinistas and Allende and

people in El Salvador and resistance fighters in Indonesia, and so on.
For Bush, it was the Sandinistas and Allende and

people in El Salvador and resistance fighters in Indonesia, and so on.

"The infiltration into the Americas by terrorists,

by outside interference and those who

aren’t just aiming at El Salvador, but, I think, are aiming at

the whole of Central, and possibly later, South America, and,

I’m sure, eventually, North America."

It worked so well that by 1984 the second conference on international terrorism

was held not in Jerusalem, but in Washington, D.C.

So, that was one of the first seeds of planting the idea of

characterizing Muslims and Arabs and Palestinians as terrorists.

It’s interesting, right after 9/11,

Margaret Thatcher wrote an article that crowed saying: “Islam is the new Bolshevism”.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the US had a problem.

They couldn’t justify the massive military spending and the imperial control

and the bases and things and the American people were clamoring for a piece dividend.

In 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed

and Bush Sr. was now president, he set up the DPG Group,
the Defense Policy Guidance Group,

to come up with strategies for making United States
a permanent empire in the world,

giving it permanent control.

Dick Cheney was leading it

and Rumsfeld and Powell came up with two conflicting, two alternate scenarios.

Rumsfeld’s was selected. It was basically

proposed taking over the Middle East and the Caspian Sea area.

When that one was exposed by the NY Times

it became part of the reason that Bush Sr. was

turfed out of office, it was a scandal.

Shortly after that, I think in 1994 or 1995, Zalmay Khalilzad

was commissioned to write a piece under the direction of Brzezinski.

He wrote this book, again, saying that

the Caspian Sea area, which includes Afghanistan,

and the Middle East both needed to be conquered in order for the US to have permanent control.

And again, Khalilzad said this would be a difficult sell

to the American public and that you would need a pretext incident -

- it was the first time pretext incident was mentioned.

What was happening at the same time was that the US was maneuvering

the Caspian Sea area: Tajikistan, Kazakhstan –

for their minerals and their natural gas especially, and also

they were trying to set up US bases that would ring the area and

control China, India and what had been the Soviet Union.

In 1997 two things happened: Zbigniew Brzezinski who had been the policy adviser under Carter,

he wrote The Grand Chessboard, and this is

an amazingly Machiavellian book that’s really worth reading

and basically he said that if you control the Middle East and the Caspian Sea area, you control the world because,

basically, you’re in the middle of Europe and China and Africa and Asia…

"To Dr. Brzezinski, I can’t say enough about

his contribution to our country. Somebody who has,

over decades, trained some of the most prominent

foreign policy specialists, not just in the Democratic Party but has trained a number

who ended up in the Republican Party as well.

He is one of our most outstanding scholars,

one of our most outstanding thinkers.

He has proven to be an outstanding friend and somebody who I’ve learned an immense amount from."

The last thing, of course, was the RAD: Rebuilding America’s Defenses put up by the Project for the New American Century,

which literally said: ‘"We reaffirm the values of the Defense Policy Guidance report

and are basically expanding it."

And it laid out everything, all the major policy changes that became the part of Bush’s war on terror.

Also, in that, they said we would need a new Pearl Harbor type incident in order to sell it.

The Taliban took over Kabul and established a government with,

and only with, the support of the US and the Saudi government.

The US was actively working with them.

Then the Taliban did two mistakes:

one was that they destroyed the poppy fields and banned heroin,

and the second thing that they did was that they

started demanding a fair share of the proceeds from the Unocal business.

The US, in July 2001, shortly before the 9/11 attacks told them:

Shortly after that the US started amassing aircraft carriers

and having military exercises all around Afghanistan -

the biggest buildup in the Caspian Sea area in history.

“Prior to 9/11?”
Prior to 9/11. In the lead-up to 9/11.

So that, it was possible – that’s why it was possible

to launch the war against Afghanistan so soon.

"Mr. Vice President,

Mr. Speaker,

members of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Yesterday,

December 7th, 1941

- a date which will live in infamy -"

"Chairman Hamid Karzai."