Friday, August 27, 2010

And They Wonder Why Aliens Never Say "Take Me To Your Leader." (Redux)

First up, we have Representative Sue Myrick, a Republican from North Carolina who thinks Iranians are learning Spanish in Venezuela so they can pass as Mexicans(?) and cross our borders with ease.



Then we have Congressman Louis Gohmert from Texas, who envisions a future of exploding terrorist babies. Okay, so they won't actually be babies when they blow up, but still, one can't help but wonder about what they use to spike the punch at Republican picnics down there in Chuck Norris country. And that guy was a "Chief Justice?"



This sounds so tediously familiar, doesn't it? Cold War rhetoric updated for 21st century Islamaphobes. Just replace Iran & Venezuela with The Soviet Union & Nicaragua & you get the idea.


Ok, now that I've had my little giggle, I'd like to contrast this immigrant cartoon with a bit of immigrant reality.

First, we have this story:

MEXICO CITY – A wounded migrant stumbled into a military checkpoint and led marines to a gruesome scene, what may be the biggest massacre so far in Mexico's bloody drug war: a room strewn with the bodies of 72 fellow travelers, some piled on top of each other, just 100 miles from their goal, the U.S. border.

The 58 men and 14 women were killed, the migrant told investigators Wednesday, by the Zetas cartel, a group of former Mexican army special forces known to extort migrants who pass through its territory.


If authorities corroborate his story, it would be the most horrifying example yet of the plight of migrants trying to cross a country where drug cartels are increasingly scouting shelters and highways, hoping to extort or even recruit vulnerable immigrants.

"It's absolutely terrible and it demands the condemnation of all of our society," said government security spokesman Alejandro Poire.

The Ecuadorean migrant stumbled to the checkpoint on Tuesday, telling the marines he had just escaped from gunmen at a ranch in San Fernando, a town in the northern state of Tamaulipas about 100 miles from Brownsville, Texas.

The Zetas so brutally control some parts of Tamaulipas that even many Mexicans do not dare to travel on the highways in the states.

Many residents in the state tell of loved ones or friends who have disappeared traveling from one town to the next. Many of these kidnappings are never reported for fear that police are in league with the criminals.




Now, for the sake of reality, a sometimes brutal & bloody Brother's Grimm-like place that's been seriously neutered here in America with the stiletto heel of Uncle Walt's Sleeping Beauty, we're going to "get real."
(If lurid imagery offends you, now's the time to bail)


Below, we have a slew of visual aids to give this lump of drug massacre text a little spice. These images were taken from Blog Del Narco, a web-site supposedly run by "a student in northern Mexico majoring in computer security."
While journalists are shying away from drug related stories, Blog Del Narco, started as a "hobby," now boasts "hundreds of postings a day that average 3 million hits a week."

It's quite easy to see why. The site is the lurid, unedited reality of drug war. There are bloody crime scene photos of shootings sitting side by side with interrogation/murder/decapitation videos. The real question is how a "college hobbyist" could lay his hands on such a large volume of material without the collusion of either the police or the cartels, or maybe both.

The level of violence portrayed on Blog Del Narco is astounding. These are statements etched in meat that are meant to be seen. And feared. I suppose one could call them the quintessential terrorist butchers.

Now, I emphasized this bit from the story above:

The 58 men and 14 women were killed, the migrant told investigators Wednesday, by the Zetas cartel, a group of former Mexican army special forces known to extort migrants who pass through its territory.


because it is so utterly stereotypical.

The Mexican military has a long history of collusion in cartel affairs. According to retired DEA agent Mike Levine, a drug shipment he arranged back in the mid 80s was guaranteed a military escort through Mexico. Unfortunately, Mr. Levine never had a chance to see the Mexican military in action once his cover was blown. Levine insists that, then Attorney General, Edwin Meese, blew his cover.

Oh shit! The US Government colluding with (gasp) drug dealers.

I know. I know. Utterly shocking.

Which brings us to the photos.
















Gruesome, eh? Here's eyewitness testimony:

"Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off, and their eyes poked out. They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit."


Shit, my bad. That was eyewitness testimony about the Contras. Although, it all seems so...so...interchangeable, doesn't it?

Oh well, since we've opened that Pandora's Box, let's look a little closer.

But despite the efforts of the White House PR machine, the Contras increasingly appeared to be a particularly ruthless and bloodthirsty bunch. Stories of atrocities against civilian noncombatants certainly didn’t help. In the words of human rights group Americas Watch, "the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses … so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war." Another NGO compiled a year’s worth of Contra atrocities, which included murder, rape, torture, maiming children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, and amputating genitals.


Since the cartels torture & murder, and the CIA tortures & murders, I suppose their marriage was inevitable. The marriage has been sold to us as one of necessity. The CIA, innocent victims of circumstance, needed to clandestinely support anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua once Congress withdrew funding. These limitations restricted the pool of allies from which they had to choose.

In some way, that even sounds believable. The cartels were around long before the Contra War, therefore they had the manpower, the experience, & the connections to move large amounts of secret cargo through Central & South America. In view of the large amounts of anticommunist propaganda disseminated throughout America since the 50s, it's even understandable that the average field agent would believe that communism was a greater threat to America than drugs or drug cartels.

The only thing wrong with this theory is that the facts do not support it.
US actions in Nicaragua were just the last acts in a long running Latin American grand guignol directed by the US government. Guatamala, Chile, El Salvador, etc., may have been painted with a communist brush, but, in most cases, the painting was done in watercolors. Anyone applying a little water could see the rot underneath.

Even before communism reared its ugly head, America was incessantly sticking its nose into Latin America's business. Marine Corp. General Smedley Butler had this to say:

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.


US corporations have a long history of confiscating the resources of Latin America. Under US installed regimes they found a climate favoring plunder & corruption. I can think of no Latin American dictator who ended up broke at the end of his tenure as US puppet. Anti-communism was just another excuse in a long line of excuses.

The U.S. was so afraid of being infected with Communism that it didn't notice that it was being infected with anti-Communism.


I think this describes the American people quite nicely. It just fails to address the dichotomy between the leaders & the led when using the term "U.S." One created the fear, while the other just consumed it. The lead ups to both Iraq & Afghanistan demonstrate that little has changed here in the land of the free.

The only real difference I can see between Butler's day & the US's Cold War antics is that, in Butler's day, the US had the courtesy to send their own military as enforcers. Post World War 2 excursions into Latin America were done primarily by proxy.
The C.I.A. provided training while the US tax payer provided copious funding. All the client state had to provide were the thugs.

As this short bit shows, training had little to do with either freedom or democracy.




I like to think of this time as the Disneyfication of America. Much like Uncle Walt's shiny Main Street USA



hides Disney's authoritarian labor practices & its co-opting of childhood innocence in the name of greed, the US continually hides its black little heart behind a shiny coating of patriotic small town righteousness.

For instance, Reagan's championing of the Contras as "freedom fighters" & "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers" led to campaigns such as this one:



where folk were encouraged to adopt a Contra with their spare change. & this lovely game from Nintendo:




In it, you become "a Contra" fighting aliens known as "Red Falcons." Two of the primary game characters are Sylvester Stallone & Arnold Schwarzenegger knock offs who defend the Earth against the evil "Red Menace." &, if this isn't blatant enough, the games ending theme was entitled "Sandanista."

Let's momentarily stop to think about this.
You take this kid:



and sell him a sanitized fantasy version of this:

"In the words of human rights group Americas Watch, ‘the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses … so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war.’ Another NGO compiled a year’s worth of Contra atrocities, which included murder, rape, torture, maiming children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, and amputating genitals.”


Tra loo, tra lay, eh?

"
Animation as a form of historical memory has entered real space. After all, any space or film that uses manipulated, interactive imagery must be called, by definition, a form of animation; and we are increasingly being submerged in life as a video game, even while our political crises deepen, and our class difference widens...We act out stories inside cartoons now."
Norman M. Klein




Mr. Klein neglected to point out that the cartoons are written by sociopaths.

As the "shock & awe" nature of the opening news article shows, as it emphasizes the escalating brutality of the drug cartels while leaving out the glaring fact that we were there first & we did it better than these crime lord wanna-bes, Neglect 101 seems to be a prerequisite for most modern journalism degrees. Most, but not all.

From Robert Parry:

Reagan portrayed the bloody conflicts as a necessary front in the Cold War, but the Central American violence was always more about entrenched ruling elites determined to retain their privileges against impoverished peasants, including descendants of the region’s Maya Indians, seeking social, political and economic reforms.

One of the most notorious acts of brutality occurred in December 1981 in and around the Salvadoran town of El Mozote. The government’s Atlacatl Battalion – freshly trained and newly armed thanks to Reagan’s hard-line policies – systematically slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children.

When the atrocity was revealed by reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Reagan administration showed off its new strategy of “perception management,” denying the facts and challenging the integrity of the journalists.

Because of that P.R. offensive, the reality about the El Mozote massacre remained in doubt for almost a decade until the war ended and a United Nations forensic team dug up hundreds of skeletons, including many little ones of children.


Now that's how you stage a massacre.

It would be easy to write off C.I.A. involvement in the drug trade as a Cold War aberration, but that would be a mistake. David MacMichael, a former CIA analyst once said, "Drugs and covert operations go together like fleas on a dog." And any cursory glance at Mad Cow Morning News or Parry's Consortium site tells a different story.

Consider, for example, the case of Vladimiro Montesinos, a shadowy figure rarely seen in public, who for many years was the CIA's principal point man in Peru and a lynchpin in the U.S. government's $17.7 billion war on drugs. Trained as a cadet at the School of the Americas, a notorious breeding ground for assassins, Montesinos became head of the Peruvian intelligence service, SIN, in the early 1990s.

During the decade that his leadership of Peru's spy agency won U.S. praise and support, Montesinos built a billion-dollar criminal empire based on drug trafficking, arms dealing, and judicial and political corruption, according to Peruvian parliamentary investigators.

Several recently captured cocaine barons claimed they had been paying Montesinos a monthly fee to let them operate. "The groups that reached an agreement with Montesinos's men could be sure that their competitors would be eliminated," explained Roger Rumrill, an expert on the Peruvian drug trade.

What's more, according to Peruvian prosecutors, Montesinos used drug profits to finance death squads, which were responsible for torture, extra-judicial executions, and the disappearance of 4,000 government opponents. By choosing Montesinos as its main ally in Peru, the CIA turned a blind eye to human rights abuses as well as his involvement in the drug trade.

Eventually, his CIA handlers wised up and realized that Montesinos had been taking them for a ride. They cut him loose in August 2000 after disclosures that the Peruvian spymaster had betrayed his patrons in Langley, Virginia, by selling arms to leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.

Montesinos is currently a fugitive from justice, and the so-called war on drugs continues to provide a thinly veiled cover for U.S.-backed counterinsurgency in Colombia.


Back in 2001, President Bush declared a War on Terror while leaving out the inconvenient fact that the US has, over the years, quite liberally wielded terror for its own ends. The same selective memory permeates the rhetoric of the drug war. Folk like Bill O'Reilly call for deployment of the National Guard to our borders, while context-less news stories of bloody slaughters help fan the drug hysteria. All of this done without once mentioning the inconvenient fact that the US often dabbles in drug dealing.

At what point does cognitive dissonance unravel? In Leon Festinger's book, When Prophecy Fails, belief was, for some odd reason, initially reaffirmed by the failed prophecy of the group's leaders. But, over time, belief collapsed under the weight of contrary evidence. We aren't so lucky here in the US of A. Failed prophecies & inconvenient truths can be endlessly reshuffled & repackaged thanks to our monstrously large propaganda industry. Given new faces, & new names, these stories can be easily resold to an increasingly credulous & illiterate population who seem incapable of recognizing their similarities & internal inconsistencies. Awash in a sea of disinformation, misinformation, & outright lies, our cognitive dissonance has thrived quite nicely. I see little reason to believe that will undergo any appreciable change in the near future.

10 comments:

ericswan said...

I have no clue what a Contra is and your piece didn't clear that up for me. As for the violence, Fulford posted a link a year ago, of a young woman that was captured and drawn and quartered by these creatures out in jungles of Burma/whoknowswhere. This stuff is beyond comprehension but not beyond the workings of satan. I don't get the CIA/NSA link to the drug cartels and why would they go after the migrant aliens in the first place. My take on the media reports was that the victims were other drug dealers, police or politicians that were fighting the drug dealers. This is terror and it seems to be protecting the border.

Honestly, I don't get it. Who is doing this? Why are they doing it? Who is protecting them and where does the American government get off letting this happen on their border? This stuff is headed our way. NAFTA,SPP, the Amero...you have got to be kidding.

Morocco Bama said...

My God, these Rabbit Holes are everywhere. One must consider that a key tenet of the intelligence services is to neutralize any potential threat and one way to do that is not only to co-opt and control any and all opposition, but oftentimes to foment (literally create) and contain that opposition. I believe Narco News is part of that strategy. I bring this up because you linked to Narco News to support your analysis. Don't get me wrong, I agree with your analysis, but the link to Narco News is not necessary, and in fact, only serves to taint an otherwise solid expose.

NARCO NEWS-CIA CONNECTIONS

http://bushplanet.blogspot.com/2009/11/narco-news-cia-connections.html

Narco News Promotes CIA Agenda's in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador

http://bushplanet.blogspot.com/2010/06/narco-news-promotes-cia-agendas-in.html

Morocco Bama said...

I have no clue what a Contra is and your piece didn't clear that up for me.

You're right, Eric, Richard should have cleared that up for you. This help explains what a Contra is. As you would imagine, a very festive group....trained in their techniques right here in the good ol USA. Disgusting, aren't they?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPmHoStII8

Morocco Bama said...

How is this Fulford guy still alive after claiming what he's claimed, Eric? Is he renting a room in the same cave Obama bin Laden's hiding out in.....that illusive cave that exists somewhere in another parallel universe?

ericswan said...

Thanks Shrub..That clears it up for me.

just_another_dick said...

Eric, the piece worked better in my mind. I agree, I completely fucked up the translation.
I almost deleted it last night.
Now, after what Shrub showed me, I just may do that.

Originally, I just wanted to show that what these guys are doing, & being rightly condemned for, is not much different than what the USA condoned under "the 2nd most popular president in US history."

I think that our national morality plays the flip-flop game too much to have any actual meaning.

And, quite frankly, I got bogged down in links.

Sorry.

The idea still appeals to me, so maybe I'll just redo it when I have time.

Don't know.

I doubt that the infosphere bucket will miss my drop very much anyway.

Again, sorry guys.
I've disappointed myself too.

just_another_dick said...

Shrub, your link explains why the Daily Kos blogger was given so much air time on news shows.
That was something I couldn't really understand since his blog wasn't any better than any other blog.
At times his site was so annoyingly PC liberal that it didn't do much for me except grate on my nerves.

just_another_dick said...

Reedited & redone. By no means perfect, but I'm a bit more comfortable with it. Thanks for the honest criticism. I think it was much deserved.

Morocco Bama said...

Excellent redaction, Richard. Adopt a Contra!! I love it. What a great find on your part.....and such a noble gesture for all those who contributed. I wonder if they sent you periodic pictures of your adopted contra standing beside the dismembered corpse he just mutilated? It'd be nice to hang on your refrigerator.....or to use as beat off material. I mean, I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I'm glad Richard put those photos back up. Those beauties give me a raging hard on....especially the last photo...look at that hairy ass with no arms and no legs....such perfect form and symmetry blanketed in a a mix of crimson and pubic. They should create a magazine and have a dismembered playmate of the month. Think of the bevy of subscribers they would garner.

ericswan said...

Former Mexican military/police were trained by American and Canadian forces in crowd control/interventions/mind control and shortly thereafter, joined the Zetas/Condos/Contras. So I'm sticking to my original comment..Why are these guys taking the responsibility for guarding the American border. Now, I feel I can answer that question to satisfy myself (and Shrub). They are trained to satisfy.