I recently attended a showing of Oliver Stone’s new documentary film, “South of the Border”, which concerns seven present-day government leaders of Latin America -– in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay, Cuba and Brazil — who are not in love with US foreign policy. After the film there was a discussion panel in the theatre, consisting of Stone, the two writers of the film (Tariq Ali and Mark Weisbrot) and Cynthia Arnson, Director of the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington; the discussion was moderated by Neal Conan of National Public Radio.
It perhaps was not meant to be a “debate”, but it quickly became that, with Arnson leading the “anti-communist” faction, supported somewhat by Conan’s questions and more vociferously by a segment of the audience which took sides loudly via applause and cries of approval or displeasure. Twenty years post-Cold War, anti-communism still runs deep in the American soul and psyche. Candid criticism of US foreign policy and/or capitalism is sufficient to consign a foreign government or leader to the “communist” camp whether or not that term is specifically used.
I believe it is human nature to want to be right (as in “correct” not “conservative). I like to be right. I also like to research my facts because being wrong to me is embarrassing. The one time I would have loved to be in error, though, was in a conviction that began over two years ago.
I was convinced that Barack Obama was not the progressive-peace-savior that many of my friends and colleagues were making him out to be.
But, I was right about that, and I think the facts have borne me out: the Overseas Contingency Operation (formerly known as George’s War OF Terror) has become even more of a quagmire under the new regime; healthcare was not so much reformed or overhauled as it was a handout to the health insurance companies; the oppressive police state is increasing; no accountability for war criminals (few people will prosecute themselves); torture continues; financial industry reform looks like it is guaranteed for further rich v. poor conquest; and this administration has proven to be as good a friend to Big Oil as the last one.
In a letter to President Barack Obama date June 17, 329 out of 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives referred to Israel’s May 31 attack on a humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters, which resulted in the deaths of nine passengers and crew and injuries to scores of others, as an act of “self-defense” which they “strongly support.” Similarly, a June 21 Senate letter — signed by 87 out of 100 senators — went on record “fully” supporting what it called “Israel’s right to self-defense,” claiming that the widely supported effort to relieve critical shortages of food and medicine in the besieged Gaza Strip was simply part of a “clever tactical and diplomatic ploy” by “Israel’s opponents” to “challenge its international standing.”
The CIA has defended its new $100 million (£66m) contract with a notorious mercenary outfit to protect US diplomats in Afghanistan.
In a rare television interview on Sunday, CIA director Leon Panetta confirmed that his agency had hired Xe Services – the company once known as Blackwater – to provide “protective security services” at US consulates in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.
Mr Panetta insisted that the US intelligence service did not have “much choice but to accept that contract” after Xe underbid other competitors “by about $26m.”
Critically-acclaimed Hollywood Director Oliver Stone dropped by our studio for a Brave New Conversation, where I spoke with him about his latest documentary South of the Border, scheduled to be released in more than 30 countries this month. South of the Border begins by exploring the role that the corporate-owned mainstream media in the U.S. and Venezuela have played in shaping American’s perspectives on South America, beginning with clips of the attempted coup on Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. In the Brave New Conversation, Stone describes the South American press:
The press [in South America] is totally owned privately, and most of that press, unlike most Americans realize, is anti-reform. Anybody who comes along and wants to change anything is castigated in the press. Chavez is one example: They kill him every day. The press is vibrant, it’s oppositional, calls for his resignation, calls him a madman, and sometimes calls for an overthrow of the government. This is going on everyday and in America they say there’s censorship. We’re crazy; if we had a press like that, it’d be Fox News on steroids.
Speaking today in the wake of the G20 Summit, President Barack Obama criticized what he called “a lot of obsession” about ending the war in Afghanistan and withdrawing some 100,000 American troops from the nation.
The US initially invaded Afghanistan in late 2001. The number of troops in the nation has rising precipitously since President Obama took office in 2009, inheriting a war with 30,000 troops and turning it into a war with 100,000 troops.
It’s a true and tested tactic. Announce an investigation. Give the public the time and space it needs to get over its outrage. The political storm will subside. The limelight will forsake the activists and their sympathizers. After that it will be back to business as usual. The waiting game has stood the ruling coalition, the Congress-led UPA, in good stead on past occasions and enabled it to tide over turbulent times. And it was expected to save the situation when a white-hot wave of indignation swept across the country in the wake of the Bhopal court’s verdict in the Union Carbide case. No doubt the political establishment believed the government could return to carrying out Washington’s diktat or fulfilling the bidding of business magnates once calm had been restored.
Unfortunately, President Obama missed an opportunity today to not only replace an out-of-control general but an out-of-control and failing strategy in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, mainstream media continue to miss the most serious story contained in the now famous Rolling Stone profile.
Michael Hastings’ piece is about more than an adolescent general and his buddies’ school-yard shenanigans in Kabul and Paris. It was about a failing strategy in Afghanistan and the disconnect between how the administration portrays the war in public and the reality of how the war is actually being waged.
Here are three points in the Rolling Stone article that contradict what the White House has presented to Congress and the American people about the war in Afghanistan:
“Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further.” A senior military official stationed in Afghanistan told Hastings: “There’s a possibility we could ask for another surge of US forces next summer if we see success here.”
I greet you from inside the walls of the prisons of the occupation, with the voice of thousands of Palestinian and Arab political prisoners. On behalf of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, the Palestinian national movement, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, I carry our salutes to the US Social Forum, this coming together of movements of oppressed peoples to organize and stand together against racism, colonialism, oppression and imperialism.
By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, Consortiumnews.com, June 22, 2010
Editor’s Note: The remarkably biased U.S. reporting on Iran’s election a year ago – portraying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory as “fraudulent” despite strong evidence to the contrary – has laid the groundwork for a new Middle East conflict, much as bogus reporting on Iraq’s WMD did in 2002-03.
Washington’s conventional wisdom has now wrapped itself into the logical pretzel of backing a “democracy movement” whose goal is to overturn the democratic judgment of a foreign people, as Edward S. Herman and David Peterson report in this guest essay:
It is almost a commonplace that the flow of information, opinion, and moral indignation in the United States adapts well to the demands of state policy.
If the state is hostile to Iran, even openly trying to engage in “regime change,” and if it is supportive of the state of Israel, no matter what crimes Israel may commit, and if it doesn’t like the populist president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and supports his overthrow and a follow-up “demonstration election” by the local elite, the media and many intellectuals will follow the state agenda, even if they must indulge in mental somersaults.
Posted as a complement to Stephen Zunes’s Foreign Policy in Focus piece 
Obama insisted that instead of considering if and how the war will ever come to some sort of end, his “
Peace and Justice Post 
The Cold War is over. Long live the Cold War.
July 6, 2010I recently attended a showing of Oliver Stone’s new documentary film, “South of the Border”, which concerns seven present-day government leaders of Latin America -– in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay, Cuba and Brazil — who are not in love with US foreign policy. After the film there was a discussion panel in the theatre, consisting of Stone, the two writers of the film (Tariq Ali and Mark Weisbrot) and Cynthia Arnson, Director of the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington; the discussion was moderated by Neal Conan of National Public Radio.
It perhaps was not meant to be a “debate”, but it quickly became that, with Arnson leading the “anti-communist” faction, supported somewhat by Conan’s questions and more vociferously by a segment of the audience which took sides loudly via applause and cries of approval or displeasure. Twenty years post-Cold War, anti-communism still runs deep in the American soul and psyche. Candid criticism of US foreign policy and/or capitalism is sufficient to consign a foreign government or leader to the “communist” camp whether or not that term is specifically used.
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Tags:Afghanistan, Cold war, Communism, David Petraeus, Documentary, Hugo Chavez, Oliver Stone, Soviet Union, Stanley McChrystal, U.S. foreign policy, Venezuela, war
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