The U.S. has a long history of unleashing chemical and biological warfare against civilians both abroad and at home, primarily as an experiment but also to get rid of outdated stockpiles and make room for new generation weapons. Canadian author Robert Rodvik rips into Barack Obama for hypocritically warning Syria against its alleged use of chemical weapons and lambastes his own country which, from a potential U.S. target, turned into a U.S. accomplice in the chemical warfare waged against the Vietnamese people.
- Toxic Chemical Workers perform a meticulous inspection of chemical weapons stockpiles.
- http://www.cma.army.mil/bluegrass.aspx
In the world of realpolitik, nothing takes place in the USA or its NATO partners that isn’t infused with massive dollops of propaganda and then stretched out further by the chattering class who regard hypocrisy as a normal adjunct of their role as soothsayers for war and ever more war, since the arms merchants in truth dictate US foreign policy while the Pentagon Press, a.k.a the Mainstream Media brainwash the masses into support for their murderous policies.
There is no point, after all, in the manufacturing of war material unless it is to be used.
Bombs left on shelves will otherwise rot and disintegrate; useless to all warmongers and therefore given true purpose by the military thugsters who once served the Pentagon but by virtue of the revolving door now revel in their extravagant rewards paid by the arms merchants, the new paymasters for this warrior hierarchy running the criminally capitalist nations – the ultimate hypocrisy being the notion that these countries stand for democracy and concern for humanitarian principles.
I recall, for example, an accidental meeting I had with a gentleman at a bar In Los Angeles some years back which was quite instructive as to US policy in behalf of the Killer gang.
After some minutes of conversation I asked what my new companion did by way of employment. He then pulled out a business card which stated his name and below that the words: “Investment Castings”. I’d never heard the phrase and asked him what the hell did that mean.
“Well, when you want to make something exactly identical to another, say a bomb sight, you do so using Investment Castings. There isn’t an iota of difference from number one to number twenty-thousand and one.”
So I asked him the next question: who uses this mechanism of production?
“Well the military of course. They’re my only clients.”
“So,” I continued, “do you manufacture a lot of weapons this way?”
“My friend,” he responded, “you would not believe it. The government has warehouse after warehouse filled to the brim with war toys. And that’s just here in L.A. The whole country is loaded to the brim.”
Obviously there’s no point in paying to store this stuff. Its best use is in acquiring an excuse for the War Criminals to first find, then demonize some recalcitrant subject in order for the emptying of the soon to be out of date contents in America’s Investment Castings’ warehouses.
The Pentagon Press will never reveal what I have just told you because they need those education-lacking sheeple to be warriors, not philosophers. And the media, print and electronic, are true masters in the propaganda business. War is Peace the truly gullible are repeatedly instructed.
And, thanks to a pitiful education system, the suckers keep buying the newspeak and give their lives (taking many more other lives) so that the arms merchants, including the Bush family’s Carlyle Group, can reap endless exceptional profit. That’s what capitalism is about, isn’t it?
Returning to the subject of hypocrisy, a couple of recent headlines caught my attention. The first was Obama’s highly hypocritical line of the “enormous consequences” Syria would suffer if it attempted to use chemical or biological weapons against anyone attacking it.
A number of wholly disgraceful actions by the terrorist nation Obama represents comes to mind. The first event occurred in the inter-war period of the Twenties and Thirties when the US was planning to invade Canada to take over our country’s abundant water resources – War Plan Red.
According to Floyd Rudmin who is the authoritative researcher of War Plan Red, the 1928 draft stated that “it should be made clear to Canada that in a war she would suffer grievously,” as the militant gangsters are so capable of. In his book Bordering on Aggression: Evidence of US Military Preparations Against Canada, Rudmin provides the following information:
In October 1934, the Secretary of War and Secretary of Navy approved an amendment authorizing the strategic bombing of Halifax, Montreal and Quebec City by “immediate air operations on as large a scale as practicable.” A second amendment, also approved at the Cabinet level, directed the U.S. Army, in capital letters, “TO MAKE ALL NECESSARY PREPARATIONS FOR THE USE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE FROM THE OUTBREAK OF WAR. THE USE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE, INCLUDING THE USE OF TOXIC AGENTS, FROM THE INCEPTION OF HOSTILITIES, IS AUTHORIZED…”
Rudmin concludes that the use of poison gas “was conceived as an humanitarian action that would cause Canada to quickly surrender and thus save American lives.” Similar reasoning, we should recall, led the US to drop atomic bombs on Japan; the worst war crime since Genghis Khan’s massacres of entire populations in order to enrich his coffers – a true capitalist indeed.
Obviously the Second World War put the US invasion of Canada on hold but had no effect regards US use of chemical warfare. At the height of WWII and the US invasion at the boot of Italy, the US had positioned hundreds of Naval warships and supply vessels at the protected harbor in Bari, Italy.
Unknown to virtually everyone, both Italian citizens and US personnel, Washington’s war criminals had loaded hundreds of Mustard Gas bombs aboard the USS John Harvey. Then, as in all wars, shit happened.
As told by author Glenn B. Infield in his seminal book Disaster at Bari, what can go wrong certainly will go wrong. Thus:
On December 2, 1943 the Luftwaffe flew down the Italian coast and arrived at Bari which was vastly overcrowded with US ships in the harbor, which itself was “lit up like a Christmas tree.” In the course of German bombing seventeen Allied ships were sunk and the John Harvey “dissolved in a massive explosion” all hands blown to bits. Hundreds died in an instant but the worst was yet to come. As the Mustard gas mixed with oil and contaminants in the water it released a deadly cloud which killed thousands, mostly Italian citizens – in their own homes in Bari. Whether any may have been saved will never be known, but since the US withheld the reason for the mysterious poisoning in order to cover up their criminality, any chances for clinical assistance was quickly lost. Land of the free and home of the brave.
Operation Ranch Hand [1]
The consistent use of chemical and biological warfare against its enemies soon morphed into the “biggest chemical war the world has ever seen.” There is little one can add to that comment except to offer some further background.
For instance, this alleged “humanitarian” campaign in Indochina that killed some three million Vietnamese, mainly directly, also left behind a massively ravaged landscape poisoned far into the future, whose legacy tells us everything we need to know about US morals and, even more importantly, its inherent madness.
In total, 83 million liters of herbicides, principally Agent Orange, were spread over a quarter of the surface area of South Vietnam. Considering the multiple toxins contained in the chemical witches brew, its devastating effects were well understood by US scientists in DOD pay and among the military hierarchy who were destroying Vietnam by every means, short of nuclear.
People with strong morals and decency had to wonder the manner of depraved, twisted persons engaged in this despicable exercise. Some of the results can still be seen as the toxins still plague many areas and any chance of cleanup has been resisted by the offending nation.
Inside the Tu Du obstetrics and gynecological hospital in Ho Chi Minh city, in northern Vietnam is a room with a view like no other. Its walls are lined with simple shelves and the shelves safeguard hundreds of large laboratory jars containing foetuses. These are no ordinary foetuses: some have two heads, some have a single eye in the middle of the forehead, and all without exception have limbs and torsos that are grotesquely twisted and distorted; bizarre alien babies in a looking-glass graveyard.
Having unleashed this wholly criminal operation against the peasant population of Third World Vietnam the US neither offered help in cleaning up the contaminated lands nor in providing the once-offered $5bn dollars, soon enough taken off the table.
Business as usual by the world’s leading terrorist nation. In its attempted destruction of Vietnam, the US was well aided by its northern satrap, the government of Canada. Much as Foreign Affairs minister John Baird today laughingly blames Iran for being the “greatest danger to world peace”, Paul Martin, secretary of state for external affairs in the Pearson Liberal government made the following comment in House of Commons debate in 1966:
“I believe it is important, first of all to clearly recognize that it is North Vietnam which for more than ten years has been the aggressor; and which since 1954 has been trying to get by military means what it could not obtain by political means, namely control over South Vietnam territory. In that situation the United States have but answered a call from the South Vietnam authorities.”
As researcher Victor Levant correctly notes, Liberal Paul Martin was either a man of “monumental ignorance” or else displayed “the cold calculations of a co-conspirator.” Judging from my own research I would say that it was a combination of both. Canadian politicians regularly exhibit amazing ignorance of foreign affairs and easily put that ignorance into servicing US hegemony across the planet. A few months later Martin would add:
“If this…aggression [by North Vietnam] is allowed to succeed there will be incalculable consequences for world peace…Suffice it to say that if North Vietnam succeeds in taking over the whole of Vietnam by force…we would in my judgement be guilty of an error of the same nature as the mistakes at Munich, and before that, in the League of Nations. Aggression is aggression, whether it takes place in Europe, Ethiopia or in Vietnam.” [2] [3]
Clearly then, Liberal Paul Martin and Conservative John Baird can both be seen as US toadies, participating in the slaughter of innocents in those countries that are virtually unable to defend themselves against the rampage of the western terrorists posing as “humanitarians.”
Some 35 years after the US fled the battlefield the dioxins are still taking their toll and every attempt by the Vietnamese government to seek redress in US courts has been refused, even to this day. Wherever the US goes, justice is forever denied.
Lastly, there is another headline that caught my attention. It goes like this:
The Obama administration has called on Iraq to require Iranian planes transiting its airspace en route to Syria to land for inspections to prove they are not carrying weapons to Syrian military forces.
The hypocrisy therein is so incredible only a good laugh can do justice to the absurdity of the charge. Here we have the US and its toadies delivering every armament of western manufacture to their death squad pals who are attempting to install a Sharia government in Syria and in the process kill each and every member of the Allawite and Christian communities still alive and fearing for the carnage to follow the US-led terror squads rampaging the once quiet countryside.
But thanks to the Pentagon/Corporate press all the realities discussed above remain shrouded in obfuscation and distortion. The sheeple, after all, are needed for the US wars still to come.
Noted writer Glenn Greenwald had this to say about the country of his birth:
“Over the past five years, a creeping extremism has taken hold of our federal government, and it is threatening to radically alter our system of government and who we are as a nation. This extremism is neither conservative nor liberal in nature, but is instead driven by theories of unlimited presidential power that are wholly alien, and antithetical, to the core political values that have governed this country since its founding”; for, “the fact that this seizure of ever-expanding presidential power is largely justified through endless, rank fear-mongering ——fear of terrorists, specifically——means that not only our system of government is radically changing, but so, too, are our national character, our national identity, and what it means to be American.” [4]
In my estimation the creeping extremism has existed for decades – not five years.
Robert S. Rodvik is an Internet activist and the author of The Balkans: US Covert Activity and American Media Complicity” (1995).
[1] Operation Ranch Hand was the tactical military project for the aerial spraying of herbicides in South Vietnam during the Vietnam Conflict (1961-1975). In these operations Agent Orange, the collective name for the herbicides 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, was used for defoliation.
[2] House of Commons Debates, February 19, 1965, 11511. Cited in Victor Levant, Quiet Complicity: Canadian Involvement in the Vietnam War, (Between The Lines Press: Toronto, 1986), p.54
[3] Canada, Parliament, House of Commons, Standing Committee on External Affairs and National Defence, Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence, June 10, 1965, 11.
[4] Greenwald, Glenn. “Preface”. How would a patriot act?; Working Assets Publishing (San Francisco), 2006. pp. 1-2