New Days?

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

 

 

 

 Above: Artist's perception of Trump leaving office after he failed the coup attempt. – Latuff

 

I thought this would be the least believed, least accepted, most boring, and most accurate article of the entire series. You see, it has to do with facts and a bit of elementary mathematics.  Let me start with a very counter-intuitive mathematical fact in this essay, just to give an example.  First, keep in mind that I am talking about a truly RANDOM sample, the biggest flaw in the process as no survey is truly random. Given that, the larger the population you are trying to generalize on accurately, the smaller the sample size needed. A smaller population, requires a great number of samples in order to achieve the same degree of accuracy.

 

Now, that is remarkedly absurd and preposterous, I grant you. Since I heard it twice, I then went through the process of trying to either prove or disprove such a ridiculous idea. Well, the idea is true. I've gone though the same damn mathematics again and I'm not about to do it one more time! It's true, and that's that. Another nugget of information that might be of value to you is that if you are anyayzing surveys or any statistical process, always take into account previous surverys of the same thing.

 

But that is not the point here. The point here is what seems to motivate so much animosity these days, I mean always, I think, is race. So let's look at it from a DNA and percentage angle. The first item is the fact that we differ from Chimpanzees by one percent. To put it another way, only one percent of our DNA seperates us from Chimps. So, already, 99% of our entire existence is exactly the same as the chimps. In some cases, I'm tempted to think that certain individuals are more like chimps than that 1%, but I'm not judging.

 

Now, the chance of anyone's DNA "matching" anyone elses (except an identical twin) is 1 in about 7 billion (or is it million or trillion? I don't remember). The point of all this? With all of these numbers, why is race such an issue with anyone except for political reasons? When I first saw Kamela Harris, I had absolutely no idea that she considered herself "black," or that anyone else did. The whole concept is puzzling to me.

 

More puzzling is the fact that those who are "white supremacists" Are also fundamentalist "christians". Somehow, that admits a belief in evolution and such changes take much more that 6,000 years and seem more related to climate than anything else. Still, the first sentence is probably an error. Anyhow, time to let that go as otherwise it would never finish.

 

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So now, a few observations on other matters, just for the hell of it.

 

Did anyone else notice that Trump attempted the forcible overthrow of the Government? I thought it was illegal even to advcate that. In fact, I thought of a few times when such action would be in order, but I never did advocate it. I would merely point out, much as I am doing here, that the people, Trump followers all, attempted such an action and Trump himself, along with his "Attorney Rudy", called for such an activity. 

 

There are some other issues that perhaps someone could help out with. According to the Constitution (yes, I read it), the President has the power of the pardon except in impeachment. Well, that's not exactly an accurate quote, you can check it yourself, but my question is does that mean relevant to his impeachment or while he is being impeached, or after he is impeached, or what? People still talk as if he can still pardon anyone. What I read seems a bit open to interpretation. I'm sure there is a great deal of secondary material on that.

 

In addition, if he self-pardons, and a pardon is an admission of guilt as SCOTUS decided, is he still convicted, or did he confess? "Not guilty" is out of the question. Does it mean that he gets out of prosecution for his tax fraud? Any ideas?

 

Hey, I know I've got a lot of questions and I'm not giving any answers. Well, when I give answers, nobody accepts them anyway, so why bother. I have more questions anyway. So, onward!

 

It does seem as though shutting down his Twitter account has prevented further mass riots, but is that the real reason he sulks so much? Or is the reason that Ivanka told him she just wanted to be friends from now on? Anybody have any idea if she is Jewish now?

 

There are also rumors that he has ordered that Guiliani not be paid his $20,000/day salary.  It seems perfectly consistant with his past business practices, but there is also the question of whether Derschowitz will be defending him at the Senate trial. My own sense of this is that Derschowitz will require payment in advance (judging from his general behavior), but is this all bull as has been the course in the last few years, or rather, during Donald's entire life and Rudy's own view of things. Anybody have any definitive informatin on this?

 

Would Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, as well as Lindsey Graham be censured? Certainly their behavior has been less than idea, and they are not as insane as Trump. By the way, that is a good new figure of speech: insane as Trump.

 

What would be in the traditional letter of advice one president leaves for a successor? Advice: ask yourself one question: what's in it for me?

The question remains: no one heard him explictly heard him order the attack on the capital.  Now, his ex-attorney, Cohen, pointed out that Trump indirectly gives such orders. I was reminded of Henry II of England in the 1100s who wanted Thomas Beckett removed and said "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Well, several of his devoted nobels rode all the way to Canturbury and killed Thomas Beckett." Well, did Henry order his killing or not? Well, the Pope decided he did and tht was that. [There was no Clarance Darrow in the 1100s in England.]  Shakespeare thought so as well, so that's that.

 

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Well, that's it for now.

 

 

 

 

 

Caravan and Dictators

THE ABSURD TIMES

 (Or fear and loathing on the TV.)

Illustration: Oliver North and the Iran-Contra Deal.  He was the main operator behind arming a military coup in Honduras against the Sandinistas.  This gave Iran arms and formed the backbone of several Central American countries from which the migrants are fleeing.  Ollie is now spokesman for the NRA.

It does seem to be time to update ourselves on a few things.

The problem, of course, is who cares?  Well, getting part of congress away from Trump seems like a good idea, so let's go.

I asked earlier as to whatever happened to National Brotherhood Week, and got an opinion from an attorney:

 think there was presidential decree that cut national brotherhood week to national brotherhood hour. Its also been moved to February 29th so only ever 4 years  And its between 1am and 6am but not in a row. Because those are the kind of things republicans do. "For the middle class" somehow. 

That is as close to a legal opinion I have received.

The first item is the idea that he can unilaterally deny citizenship to anyone born here, regardless of anything.  I suppose this has something to do with the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.  Well, OK.  The law is based on the 14^th Amendment (yes, there are more than two), which grants citizenship to anyone born here or "Nationalized" here and "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.  So, the reference (not that Trump knows anything about this, or did then) is to that idea of jurisdiction.  However, that was introduced in the mid to late 19^th Century and preservation to treaties made with Native Americans earlier.  (We still try to keep as many of them as possible from voting.) 

Once this was pointed out, pundits based at Fox pointed out that if the UN Ambassador from Albania has his wife who gives birth here, the child does not become a citizen.  Well, true, but that is because all such international personages have "diplomatic immunity".  So, if Donald Trump wants to deny citizenship to any non-white born here, he must grant full diplomatic immunity to the parents.  I doubt that he would try that, as he is a "stable genius" (more about that soon). 

Obama gave a speech in Miami recently.  Now, you may have noticed that many  people have talked about what a good President he was, and some even consider him one of the best in history.  I had many reservations about him, mainly in foreign policy.  In domestic matters, he was pretty good, but I do think he was not mean enough to Republicans who blocked some provisions of the Affordable Care Act and other issues.  Where he had the authority, he should have contacted these people in congress and let them know that if they did not vote for certain progressive policies, he would cut off whatever funds he could to their constituency and then make it clear that it was their fault.

However, the speech itself was refreshing, and funny.  In fact, it made me realize why I had lost pretty much all interest in current events lately.  He was actually intelligent and so was most of the crowd.  It was a refreshing change.  Some of the best observations were that even though the Republicans won, they are still angry.  Poor winners, I suppose.  Some hecklers appeared.  Now this is almost like a heckler trying to go up against a professional comedian.  No contest.  One remark was that if he was so passionate for the other guy, why doesn't he go to his rally?  Why come here? 

I guess we could make a few other observations.  Trump said that our army had the right to shoot at people throwing rocks at them.  Well, he changed that pretty quickly, but it did make me wonder.  When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I could throw a baseball rather easily 300 feet, the length of a football field, and once managed 375.  However, I would never claim to be able to throw one 900 miles and these refugees are 900 miles away.  His audience had no concept of this or anything approaching it.

I heard a good line uttered after Trump said he was a "Stable Genius".  The line was "Trump is to a stable genius as a unicorn is to a vegtable garden."  At least it is something to think about.

Now here are a few words about what precipitated these migrants:

As President Trump escalated his attacks and threats against the Central American migrant caravans making their way to the U.S.-Mexico border, the Trump administration unveiled new sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba on Thursday. National security adviser John Bolton declared Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua to be part of a "troika of tyranny" and a "triangle of terror." We speak with world-renowned professor, linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky about U.S. foreign policy in Central America. He joins us in Tucson, Arizona, where he now teaches at the University of Arizona. Chomsky is also institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught for 50 years.

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As President Trump escalates his attacks and threats against the Central American migrant caravans making their way to the U.S.-Mexico border, the Trump administration unveiled new sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba Thursday. National security adviser John Bolton declared Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua to be part of a "troika of tyranny" and a "triangle of terror." Bolton was speaking in Miami, Florida.

JOHN BOLTON: We will no longer appease dictators and despots near our shores. We will not reward firing squads, torturers and murderers. We will champion the independence and liberty of our neighbors. And this president and his entire administration will stand with the freedom fighters. The troika of tyranny in this hemisphere—Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua—has finally met its match.

AMY GOODMAN: As John Bolton spoke in Miami on Thursday, Democracy Now!'s Nermeen Shaikh and I spoke with the world-renowned professor, linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky. He joined us from Tucson, Arizona, where he now teaches at the University of Arizona. Noam Chomsky is also institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he's taught for more than 50 years. His recent books include Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy, Who Rules the World? and Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power.

I began by asking Professor Chomsky to respond to NSA, national security adviser, John Bolton's remarks on Latin America.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that, of course, immediately brings to mind the "axis of evil" speech of George Bush back in 2002, which was the precursor, laying the groundwork, for the invasion of Iraq, the worst crime of this century, with horrendous consequences for Iraq, eliciting ethnic conflicts that are tearing the region apart—a major atrocity. John Bolton was behind that. And his new troika—I doubt that the U.S. will dare to do something similar, but that's what it brings to mind.

It's kind of interesting to see this hysterical raving alongside of another astonishing propaganda campaign that Bolton and his colleagues are carrying out with regard to the caravan of poor and miserable people fleeing from severe oppression, violence, terror, extreme poverty from three countries: Honduras—mainly Honduras, secondarily Guatemala, thirdly El Salvador—not Nicaragua, incidentally—three countries that have been under harsh U.S. domination, way back, but particularly since the 1980s, when Reagan's terror wars devastated particularly El Salvador and Guatemala, secondarily Honduras. Nicaragua was attacked by Reagan, of course, but Nicaragua was the one country which had an army to defend the population. In the other countries, the army were the state terrorists, backed by the United States.

The most extreme source of migrants right now is Honduras. Why Honduras? Well, it was always bitterly oppressed. But in 2009, Honduras had a mildly reformist president, Mel Zelaya. The Honduran powerful, rich elite couldn't tolerate that. A military coup took place, expelled him from the country. It was harshly condemned all through the hemisphere, with one notable exception: the United States. The Obama administration refused to call it a military coup, because if they had, they would have been compelled by law to withdraw military funding from the military regime, which was imposing a regime of brutal terror. Honduras became the murder capital of the world. A fraudulent election took place under the military junta—again, harshly condemned all over the hemisphere, most of the world, but not by the United States. The Obama administration praised Honduras for carrying out an election, moving towards democracy and so on. Now people are fleeing from the misery and horrors for which we are responsible.

And you have this incredible charade taking place, which the world is looking at with utter astonishment: Poor, miserable people, families, mothers, children, fleeing from terror and repression, for which we are responsible, and in reaction, they're sending thousands of troops to the border. The troops being sent to the border outnumber the children who are fleeing. And with a remarkable PR campaign, they're frightening much of the country into believing that we're just on the verge of an invasion by, you know, Middle Eastern terrorists funded by George Soros, so on and so forth.

I mean, it's all kind of reminiscent of something that happened 30 years ago. You may recall, in 1985, Ronald Reagan strapped on his cowboy boots and called—got in front of television, called a national emergency, because the Nicaraguan army was two days' march from Harlingen, Texas, just about to overwhelm and destroy us. And it worked.

I mean, this spectacle is almost indescribable. Even apart from noticing where they're coming from, the countries that we have crucially been involved in destroying, it's—the ability to carry this off repeatedly is quite an amazing commentary on much of the popular culture.

But the troika, just like the "axis of evil," are those who just don't obey U.S. orders. Colombia, for example, has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere for years, but they're not part of the troika of tyranny.

All of this rings very familiar bells. It's a long—it's been a long-standing element of the U.S. propaganda system on the—mostly on the far right, but not only, which goes way back and which is a kind of pathological feature of the dominant political culture that should be understood, analyzed and dismantled.

AMY GOODMAN: World-renowned professor, linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky. When we come back, he'll share his reaction to the Pittsburgh massacre in the synagogue. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

And about Pittsburgh:

The nation is continuing to grieve the 11 Jewish worshipers who were gunned down at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh Saturday in what is being described as the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Funerals were held Thursday for three more victims of the shooting: husband and wife Sylvan and Bernice Simon, and Richard Gottfried. Robert Bowers, who is accused of the mass shooting, pleaded not guilty Thursday. Bowers is charged with 44 counts, including murder and hate crimes. We speak with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned professor, linguist and dissident, about the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and other recent white supremacist and right-wing attacks.

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. The nation is continuing to grieve the 11 Jewish worshipers who were gunned down at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh Saturday in what's being described as the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Funerals were held Thursday for three more victims of the shooting: husband and wife Sylvan and Bernice Simon, and Richard Gottfried.

Robert Bowers, who's accused of the mass shooting, pleaded not guilty Thursday. He's charged with 44 counts—including murder and hate crimes—over 30 of which could be subject to the death penalty. Bowers has a history of posting anti-Semitic and xenophobic content and was posting on the far-right social media site Gab until just before the shooting. He referred to the migrant caravan as an "invasion," repeating the words that President Trump uses.

We continue our conversation now with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned professor, linguist and dissident. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—Chomsky was. I asked him about the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and other recent right-wing attacks.

NOAM CHOMSKY: When I was a child, the threat that fascism might take over much of the world was not remote. That's much worse than what we're facing now. My own locality happened to be very anti-Semitic. We were the only Jewish family in a Irish—mostly Irish and German Catholic neighborhood, much of which was pro-Nazi, so I could see it better on the ground.

What we're now seeing is a revival of hate, anger, fear, much of it encouraged by the rhetorical excesses of the leadership, which are stirring up passions and terror, even the ludicrous claims about the Nicaraguan army ready to invade us—Ronald Reagan—the caravan of miserable people planning to kill us all. All of these things, plus, you know, praising somebody who body-slammed a reporter, one thing after another—all of this raises the level of anger and fear, which has roots.

The roots lie in what has happened to the general population over the past 40 years. People really have faced significant distress. An astonishing fact about the United States is that life expectancy is actually declining. That doesn't happen in developed societies, apart from, you know, major war or huge famine. But it's happening because of social distress, and not necessarily impoverishment. The people who are demonstrating this fear and resentment may be even moderately affluent, but what they see is they're stagnating. In the past, there was—you had this dream: You worked hard, you could get ahead, your children would be a little better. Now it stopped. It stopped for the last 40 years as a result of very specific socio and economic policies, which have been designed so that they sharply concentrate wealth, they enhance corporate power, that has immediate effects on the political system in perfectly obvious ways, even to the point where lobbyists literally write legislation. This onslaught has literally cast a bunch of the population aside. They're stagnating. They are not moving forward. They see no prospects. And they're bitter and angry about it.

And this anger and bitterness can take pathological forms. It could take very constructive forms. It could lead to popular organized movements, which would dedicate themselves to overcoming these blows against decent human existence, which certainly can be done. The groundwork for that has been severely undermined, for example, by the destruction—careful, planned destruction—of labor unions, the main force, historically, for leading the way towards more progressive, humane policies. All of these are a package. They've all gone together for 40 years—there's precursors, of course—and it has led to a situation where you get an outburst of what Gramsci once called morbid symptoms, pathological developments, of the kind that you mentioned, growing out of a soil that is rich in incitement to such things happening.

AMY GOODMAN: So, and then, if you could talk about specifically the targeting of the Jewish worshipers, I mean, and the clear connection that the shooter made between this temple and HIAS, what's formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the group that has helped to resettle refugees of any religion for well over a hundred years? And he repeated words that Trump has begun using more and more about, you know, they're helping the "invaders" come in. If you could respond specifically to that?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I think it's pretty clear that he's whipping up terror about invasions, people pouring across the border to plan to kill us all, to destroy our civilization. You take people who are already somewhat disturbed and living under harsh conditions, this can incite them to acts of extreme violence against targets like the Jewish temple. All the anti-Semitic tropes are pointing in that direction, but most—also against Afro-Americans, immigrants, any vulnerable population or population that's easy to target for lots of cultural and historical reasons, all this amplified by the loud speaker up in the White House and his minions, who are doing what they can to terrorize the population, create the conditions under which you can get something like the attack on the synagogue.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to turn, then, to a clip of the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, who was interviewed by Ayman Mohyeldin on MSNBC on Sunday, so it was soon after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. Dermer was asked if Trump's rhetoric is in part to blame for the massacre.

RON DERMER: I see a lot of bad people, on both sides, who attack Jews. This is not the first time that a Jewish community has been attacked. It is the worst anti-Semitic attack in, oh, 200 years in the United States, that you have 11 dead.

AMY GOODMAN: Dermer said no world leader had made stronger statements against anti-Semitism than Trump. And then he went on to blame both sides.

RON DERMER: To simply say that this is because of one person or it only comes on one side is to not understand the history of anti-Semitism or the reality of anti-Semitism. One of the big forces in college campuses today is anti-Semitism. And those anti-Semites are usually not neo-Nazis on college campuses. They're coming from the radical left.

AMY GOODMAN: This is right after the white supremacist attack on the synagogue, and the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. is now injecting, saying this comes from both sides. If you could respond to this? Interestingly, two days later, when Trump and his family went to Pittsburgh, the only—and this is pointed out in The New York Times—the only public official standing there to greet him was Israel's ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer. People like the Pittsburgh mayor and the others said this was not the time to come.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I think it's quite easy to understand. There is an alliance of reactionary repressive states developing under the U.S. aegis. Israel is a leading member of it. Saudi Arabia is another, one of the most brutal, regressive, harsh states in the world; United Arab Emirates; Egypt under the harsh, brutal dictatorship; the United States; Israel.

And the United States, of course, very—especially under this—the alignment goes way back, but the Trump administration has gone way out of its way to lend support to Israeli crimes, Israeli expansion. And the Israeli right wing, of course, which is increasingly dominant, is delighted. So, the fact that, say, the Israeli ambassador would come out and say that is really no more surprising than the fact that John Bolton would praise the election of a strong advocate of torture, murder and repression. It all fits the same pattern.

AMY GOODMAN: This issue of the number of people who died this weekend, the horrific massacre—11 Jews died. The model of the coverage, of knowing who each person was, hearing their names, their life stories, their ages, who their families were, knowing when the funerals are taking place through the week—what about this being a model for what's happening in Gaza? I mean, for example, on, I think it was, Friday, six Palestinians were killed, with those ongoing protests near the separation wall. Israeli military has gunned down more than 200 Palestinians. That was Friday. Six Palestinians died. And on Sunday, three Palestinian teenagers were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Gaza Strip. Your thoughts on Dermer trying to make this connection to get away from the issue of white supremacy and, somehow, someway, blame the left?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, remember, all of this in Gaza is being done with overwhelming U.S. support, even U.S. weapons, literally.

Gaza is on the verge of becoming, literally, uninhabitable. The international monitors—U.N. and others—have warned that within just a few years, it may be literally unlivable. I mean, right now, there's virtually no potable water. The sewage pours into the sea, because Israel has bombed and destroyed the power plants and the sewage plant.

Back in 2005, when Israel withdrew its illegal settlers in Gaza and moved them to illegal settlements in the West Bank, it imposed a siege on Gaza. The official terms for that—official, not making this up—are "We have to impose a diet on Gaza, not harsh enough so they'll all die"—implication being that wouldn't look very good—"but harsh enough so that they can barely survive."

And there have been—quite apart from the brutal siege, there have been repeated attacks on Gaza by the Israeli army. Gaza is virtually defenseless. This is one of the strongest armies in the world, lashing out to devastate Gaza.

There's always pretexts. There are pretexts for everything. Hitler had a pretext for invading Poland: He was protecting Germany from the wild terror of the Poles. And the Israelis, with U.S. backing, have concocted pretexts—no time to go through it here, there's plenty in print about it. Every one of them collapses on inspection. It's just a punching bag.

And the effect on the people of Gaza is to create utter desperation. The current march is just an attempt to somehow break the siege, make life possible. The problem could be overcome easily, simply by providing them with the opportunities for survival. That's it. Not trying to block every attempt at political unification of the factions. It's often been a pretext for another attack.

Some of what's gone on—parts of it we've seen—are just grotesque, like when a highly trained Israeli sniper murders a young woman far from the border who's trying to help—a Palestinian volunteer medic, young woman, who's trying to help a wounded man, and a sniper murders her. Highly trained snipers. They know what they're doing. The international monitors who have gone through the hospitals are shocked by the kinds of wounds they're finding, purposely designed to maim people so they'll barely—not kill them, but maim them, so they won't be able to have a—even take part in the minimal life that exists there.

Actually, Trump had a solution to this, to the misery of Gaza and the prospect that 2 million people, half of them children, will soon be in a situation of, literally, beyond the possibility of survival. They had a lifeline, what's called the UNRWA support, international support, which was barely keeping them alive. So, Trump's reaction is to cut it, cut support for it. And he even had a reason. He said, "They're not being grateful enough to me for my efforts to give them the ultimate deal that I'm planning." Ultimate deal, which means give up all your rights and forget it.

Two leading American political analysts, specialists on the Middle East, with long government service, Robert Malley, Aaron David Miller, really encapsulated the Trump program very simply, said the Trump message is to the Palestinians, "You have lost. Forget it. Go away. You're done. And because the people of Gaza are not sufficient—on the West Bank—or, sufficiently appreciative, let's cut the lifeline." In fact, let's even—as he did—cut support for underfunded Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank. Let's cut the funding for the UNRWA school in the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon, still reeking from the hideous Israeli-run massacre there back at the end of their invasion in '82. You see little kids playing in the mud in dark alleys. They'll never get out. Their children will be there, and so on. They had one hope: the UNRWA school. Good, let's kill that. All of this, these things are, just one after another, taking place. Indescribable.

I mean, the war in Yemen, which finally, at last, is getting a little bit of attention, has been a major horror story. The most careful estimates of the killing, that are now just coming out, show that there may be seven or eight times as high as what has been—the numbers that have been given. They're on the order of 70,000 or 80,000. The analysis of these Saudi-Emirate programs, a long study that came out of the Fletcher School of International Diplomacy at Tufts University recently, showed, quite persuasively, that the policies of the attackers are aimed at destroying the food supplies, making sure the population starves to death. They're also trying to close the port through which some supplies come.

All of this is fully backed by the United States. U.S., and Britain secondarily, supply the arms. The U.S. supplies the intelligence for the Saudi Air Force, which is carrying out massive atrocities. All of these things are happening. For years, they've barely been discussed. Now, finally, you're seeing pictures on the front page of starving Yemeni children, even a call for a ceasefire—much belated, little attention to our crucial responsibility for it.

Just like our responsibility, which is overwhelming, for the plight of the miserable people trying to escape from the troika—Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala—the three countries that have been completely under our thumb and are suffering bitterly for it, now trying to escape. So we turn them into an invasion mob planning to destroy us. All of this is surreal. It only is overshadowed by the failure to attend even minimally to the literal existential threats, that are not remote.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you consider this one of the gravest times, in your lifetime, in U.S. politics, Noam?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It's one of the gravest times in human history. Humans have been around for 200,000 years. For the first time in their history, they have to decide—and quickly—whether organized human society is going to survive for very long. And that's not in the remote distance.

Again, there are two—with all the problems and horrors in the world which should be attended to, there are two existential threats, both being increased. One is the threat of nuclear war, which is terminal. The other is the threat of severe environmental catastrophe, which doesn't destroy all human life, but it does undermine the prospects for organized society.

And you mentioned earlier a third threat, also dating back to the end of the Second World War. The end of the Second World War was the opening of the nuclear age. And as I mentioned, it's kind of a miracle that we've survived it. It's also the opening of what geologists are now calling the Anthropocene, the age in which human activity is radically affecting the environment. There's been debate about its origins. The World Geological Society more or less settled on the end of the beginning—the end of the Second World War, the late '40s and on, where there was a sharp spike in damage to the environment.

The third is what's called the sixth extinction, the extinction of species. The fifth extinction was around 65 million years ago, when it's assumed that a huge asteroid hit the Earth and ended the age of the dinosaurs. It destroyed most of the species on Earth. We're now in the midst of the sixth extinction, with very rapid destruction of other species and of the kind of environment in which they can survive, like wilderness, for example. We are pushing to the edge of not only our own survival, but that of much of the—much of life on Earth.

So, is it the most gravest moment in my life? Yes. But also in all of human history. And things like the election next week will have an impact on this.

AMY GOODMAN: World-renowned professor, linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky, speaking to us from Tucson, Arizona, where he is now teaching at the University of Arizona. He is the institute professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he's taught for more than 50 years, has written over 100 books, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We'll air more of the interview with Noam Chomsky next week.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, Ilana Glazer joins, yes, of Comedy Central Broad City. But she'll be talking about serious things right now. She'll be talking about what happened last night at an event she had planned for a Brooklyn synagogue, where she was going to be talking about politics before the midterms. The event had to be canceled because of anti-Semitic and racist graffiti that was scrawled just before the event around the synagogue. Stay with us.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Our Border?

THE ABSURD TIMES

Sometimes there is a need for more than one illustration.  Here is how Trump's visit to the U.K. will be greeted:

And here is how he is prophesized here:

And now, we consider the immigration problem.

These are very strange times and H. P. Lovecraft could never have imagined anything as strange as what we are facing.

Trump's immigration policy has resulted in some very surrealistic images and perhaps that is the only way to really discuss them.  It is true that judges down at the Texas southern border are supposed to conduct trials of undocumented children, so as young as two or three years old.  I tired to imagine what that scene looked like.

The defendant was a three year old child with no attorney since, as a non-resident, he did not qualify for a legal defense, especially or even a Public Defender.  The judge called the court to order and the prosecutor, an employee of the Federal Government stood up and made his opening remarks as to why bail should be denied and then sat down.  The judge turned to the child and asked, apparently with a straight face, "And what is your response?"  The child said "Agua" and that was it.  Yes, these are strange times.  There is no information on what happened next, although any judge in his or her right mind would would immediately dismiss the case.  That does not mean anything, however, as this happened in Texas during Trump.

Later that same day, someone posted a video of a cop down in Texas pointing a pistol at a group of ten year olds who were were protesting his strangling of a 16 year old, all of them shouting "Agua" or something else at him.  The cop is now on desk duty and that story is over for now.

Yes, it is a strange time for the sane and one wonders how we got here.  Of course, it is the age of Trump and intellectually perverted candidates are on a list of SCOTUS nominees.  One has been "chosen," and he is no Justice Garland, although he is the one who has published the most.  Of course, that is of litter interest to Trump and things that are published are written down and then have to be read, but somehow he has decided on him.

So, it has become time to explore how these people wound up at the border and what gangs they are fleeing.  It turns out that unlike the Chicago Cops of the 60s where they came from local high school gangs, these are American Military trained groups sent to fight communism and any other sort of human concerns.  Like Norriaga, who was trained for us at what was then called the "School of the Americas," they are all products of our own device.  The following interview makes that clear:

Across the United States, thousands of migrant children remain detained alone after the Trump administration forcibly separated them from their parents at the border. Yet, despite the news about the United States' human rights abuses of migrants, asylum seekers keep risking the dangerous journey to the United States. Texas-based human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury has lived in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas for more than 40 years and has long worked with people fleeing violence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. She also knows intimately the U.S. roots of this conflict. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, was a Mayan comandante and guerrilla who was disappeared after he was captured by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army in the 1980s. After a long campaign, she found there was U.S. involvement in the cover-up of her husband's murder and torture. We speak with Jennifer Harbury in Brownsville, Texas, about this history and this U.S. involvement in today's conflicts in Central America.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I want you to tell that story of Everardo, of Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, your husband, for especially young people who maybe weren't even born at that time. But to understand the roots of the violence today, talk about what happened. Your campaigning for him was, you know, one of the remarkable moments of protest, in your protest and also what you found out.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, as you said earlier, he was a Mayan Indian campesino. He had grown up starving. He was involved in the—what I call the Mayan resistance movement, which was part of the URNG resistance forces during the massacre campaign, etc., etc. He was captured alive. He was one of their highest-ranking officials, and he was captured alive on March the 12th, 1992, by the military. And they realized who he was and how much valuable intelligence he had. So, instead of—instead of killing him outright, which is what they did with 99.9 percent of the prisoners of war, they kept him alive, with the help of physicians, while they tortured him long term, with the goal of breaking him for his information. And I'm pretty sure, from the evidence I have in the CIA files, that he survived two-and-a-half to three years of torture at the hands of the military intelligence people. That team of his torturers, including the former president of Guatemala, they were all intelligence paid officials for the military who were also working for the CIA.

And I set out to search for him as soon as he disappeared, because we weren't convinced he'd been killed in combat. The army faked his death to better take advantage of his intelligence. They didn't want Amnesty—Amnesty to be crying out, or the U.N. interfering, or the Inter-American Commission.

AMY GOODMAN: And didn't you even go to a military base, where they said, "This is the coffin that Everardo was in"?

JENNIFER HARBURY: I went to a military base, where they said he might be buried under the base, along with between 500 to 2,000 other people. I'm pretty sure that's not where he is. But they faked his death. They told us he was in an unmarked grave in Retalhuleu. And at the same time, about a week after he disappeared, they sent a memo to both the White House and the State Department saying, "Oh, the army just captured Bámaca alive. He's a very, very important catch. They're going to fake his death, so they can better take advantage of his information and so that they can torture him." That was six days after he was picked up. I ended up on a long series of hunger strikes, three total, one of them for 32 days in front of the palace down there.

AMY GOODMAN: Back with human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury on her husband's death, in 20 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with immigration lawyer Jennifer Harbury when I was in Brownsville, Texas, last week, where she represents people seeking political asylum in the U.S. I played for her a clip of the documentary Dirty Secrets: Jennifer, Everardo & the CIA in Guatemala, a film about the murder of her husband, the Mayan guerrilla and comandante Efraín Bámaca Velásquez in the '80s.

JENNIFER HARBURY: I want to save my husband's life. I'm not going to allow him to be tortured for two-and-a-half years in a secret army prison and then shot to death or assassinated as if he was some kind of garbage. I'd rather die. I would literally rather die. And I'm prepared to do so if I have to.

I want people to understand what it means to have someone disappeared in their family. And I want people to understand what that whole system of terror against a civilian population is about.

When you're looking for someone you care about, you know, you don't sleep anymore. You just stop sleeping. You wonder every single minute, you know, "Am I fighting hard enough? Are they shooting him right now? You know, are they burning him right now? Are they pulling his fingernails out right now? You know, maybe I should be trying harder. Maybe I should be fighting harder."

AMY GOODMAN: That's a clip from Dirty Secrets: Jennifer, Everardo & the CIA in Guatemala. This is when you were on hunger strike in Guatemala City outside the U.S. Embassy there?

JENNIFER HARBURY: The very first hunger strike was in front of the Politécnica, close to the U.S. Embassy, but it's their army intelligence building. And it looks like the Wicked Witch of the West castle, with cannons and machine gun turrets. That was seven days. The second one, that appears in this clip, was in front of the National Palace, the government seat, and that was 32 days, water only. And then the very last one was in Washington, because they weren't assisting me. And that lasted 12 days, before the disclosures came out, with Congressman Torricelli, that my husband had indeed been killed by military intelligence officials, who were also working as paid informants of the CIA.

AMY GOODMAN: And link that to what we're seeing today. So, that was the violence of the 1980s, the U.S.-backed death squads in Guatemala. You really helped to expose this through your own personal experience. How does that relate to people coming over the border in the United States?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, let's take the example of Julio Roberto Alpirez, the colonel, right? He was witnessed torturing my husband in person. He's also known by the CIA to have helped murder Michael DeVine, a U.S. citizen innkeeper in Guatemala. There are also plenty of CIA files that say he excelled in his task of liquidating not only the guerrillas but all of their sympathizers—in other words, villagers—in the Highlands during the worst of the campaign, and that he was somewhat brutal and not well liked by his fellow military.

So, start with that person as an example. He received $44,000 shortly after he, in person, tortured my husband. He injected him with an unknown substance, out of a cylinder of gas, that made his body swell enormously, so badly that one arm and leg were bandaged because they had hemorrhaged, and he was bending over the torture table. Torricelli named him as one of those people. DEA records show that he's also on the DEA corrupt officer list. He's known to be a drug runner, a cartel leader. What did they do when the disclosures were made by Torricelli? The CIA protected him. He's their asset. They sent him and his whole family to Washington, where he lived happily for 10 years in secret, not far from the CIA. When I found out, so that I would go file a Torture Victims Protection Act case on him, the CIA notified him and immediately sent him back to Guatemala so that he could avoid any consequences. And the DEA is not allowed to take him down, because he's a CIA asset and partner for many, many years, and that's forbidden.

So there are many high-level cartel people who engaged in genocide and daily acts of torture, who now are the heads of cartels. The terrifying Zeta gang, for example, was out of Guatemala and formed by military leaders. It's also composed of many collaborators in the military still and by different police people. So these cartels are fantastically armed and trained to carry out village-by-village massacres, let alone bending people to their will. They're terrifying. I mean, some women from the Río Negro massacre, back in 1980, were not long ago found in the city dump with their teeth pulled out and their breasts and hands amputated. And those kinds of mutilations, we remember. Those are those military people. These are not street gangs. These are not kids. These are not people we have no idea who they are. The head of the Salvatrucha gang was just discovered to be a military leader in Guatemala who had been working in the anti-gang unit hand in glove with U.S. military people. They really didn't know?

AMY GOODMAN: So, that takes us to MS-13, to another country—that's El Salvador—who President Trump says he is protecting us from the gang, the MS-13 gangs in Salvador. How does that relate to what you're talking about in Guatemala?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, of course, the MS-13 had a lot of its roots in the United States, and then those people were deported back to Salvador. There's a whole lot of history where actually that—that happened in the United States, just as these military intelligence people that went back down there. Those people are firmly entrenched. And then the U.S. is not so much going after them as they are the victims of those people, the people running up here—the woman with two small children on her back, barefoot; the 15-year-old who's seven months pregnant from a gang rape; the man, the young man, 20 years old, with 17 bullets through his legs, that could show me the scars.

A 20-year-old who fled north after the second time the gangs told him they would kill him and the people close to him if he didn't join, he's cannon fodder at that age. And he said, "No," again, took his wife and baby, and fled north, called his mom to say, "I'm coming back for the rest of you. I'm coming right now." The day after he left, the gangs had bludgeoned his mother and younger brother to death and had gang-raped his 12-year-old sister, who was in a mental hospital, unable to speak. That young man has been sent back to Salvador.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to the Zetas and their connection to Special Forces, to training. The Zetas—a 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable that was published by WikiLeaks shows at least one Zeta, former infantry lieutenant named Rogelio Lopez, trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, many people, such as Julio Roberto Alpirez, who I keep mentioning because he's such a template, right? Many of them were trained at the School of the Americas, in torture and kidnapping techniques, and they used them. And then, when the war was over, they kept using them in the same way. And if we would release the files on the human rights violations and massacres committed by all of those people, then the war crimes claims that are—that people are valiantly trying to bring in Central America, something could be done. Those people could be put in prison, and then maybe we would have a lessening of the terror that's being used to drive people north in order to more easily run the drug cartels.

AMY GOODMAN: Where are the Zetas based?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, they were up here for quite a while, near Reynosa. They came originally out of Guatemala and southern Mexico. They were up here and owned the riverfront here for quite a while. They were pushed out a few years ago by the Golfo cartel. But in Reynosa now, they captured the—the army had captured the highest-level person, and they've captured or killed several lower-level ones. So that's fractured, and the Zetas are coming back. And they're all fighting each other, and they're fighting the Mexican Army and the Mexican marines. So there's nonstop shootouts.

Anyone that's deported to Reynosa, they're lucky if they can get off the bridge without being immediately grabbed, because they know they'll have someone up north. People struggling north, you know, with their babies and stuff, they're lucky if they don't get trafficked and grabbed. It's completely unsafe in Reynosa.

And the Zetas are clearly trying to come back, because a group of people recently paid off the correct cartel, what's left of the Golfo, got to mid-river and were shot to death, with no explanation. And that's almost for sure the Zetas coming back, saying, "Oh, you paid the wrong guys."

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Jennifer Harbury, the well-known human rights activist and attorney. And she is also well known now all over the country for having gotten the news organization ProPublica the tape of children, babies, infants, toddlers, children of tender age, crying out for their parents, saying, "Mama," "Papi." Let's go to that clip.

CHILD: [crying] Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá!

AMY GOODMAN: So, Jennifer Harbury, you're the person who got this audiotape out. Describe how this happened.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, the true hero, of course, is the whistleblower. And he was present in the building nearby to these children, who had just been separated from their parents recently and who were just crying desperately and in fear, the way you just heard. That whistleblower brought the tape to me, and we discussed the legal issues and stuff. And the whistleblower authorized me to get it through to the press, which is what we did.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know—can you tell us what detention center it's from?

JENNIFER HARBURY: I'd best not.

AMY GOODMAN: And how old the children were?

JENNIFER HARBURY: The children that you hear weeping would have been possibly as young as 3, up to 6 or 7. And in the background, not weeping, are some older children that are still minors.

AMY GOODMAN: And one child who keeps on repeating the phone number of her aunt.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Remarkable.

AMY GOODMAN: Has she been reunited with her family?

JENNIFER HARBURY: I don't think she has yet. I may be wrong on that, but I believe she's still trying to get reunited with her family.

AMY GOODMAN: Even though her mother has called up and said that "This is my daughter," and her aunt has confirmed that that is her number?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Even with that. And—

AMY GOODMAN: So a judge in San Diego has just ruled that these children must be reunited with their parents—under 5 in 14 days, all children in 30 days. So, what's going to happen? Is this possible?

JENNIFER HARBURY: It's possible, if they really want to put the time and attention into it that they must. The problem, of course, is that so many people within ICE and Border Patrol feel that these refugees are just kind of trash and should not be coming to our country in the first place, that things can't be that bad back home, even though you can read that they have the highest murder rates in the world. So, I'm not sure how much—how hard they're going to try. There can be spelling mistakes in a name. And, of course, in most of Central America, instead of saying June the 10th, 1984, they're going to say 10th June, 1984, so that can be transposed sometimes, making it harder to find the person. But if they want to find the parents, of course they can. And if they want to release them immediately, of course they can. They always used to.

AMY GOODMAN: So, as we sit here, a major protest about to take place right behind us at the federal courthouse, a courthouse you know well, right here in Brownsville.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: What message do you have for people across the country?

JENNIFER HARBURY: I think first we have to wake up and understand the basic flaw in the administration's argument that they're protecting us from cartels and terrorists and so forth. The people we are punishing are moms, kids, fathers, young teenagers that don't want to be trafficked, young men that are saying, "No, I won't work with the cartels." They're running for their lives. If the cartels wanted to send people to cross the river, as I said earlier, they can—they can buy the airport. They have bought several police units in Texas already. They can buy real—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, a whole elite piece of our—of the police force here, not long ago, was found out to have been working with the cartels. That was very—

AMY GOODMAN: Here in Brownsville.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Not in Brownsville, up towards McAllen, in Hidalgo County. And it's inevitable, with that kind of money. They have no need to send a desperate person who speaks no English, in raggedy clothing, to try to swim the river. They don't need that. They just buy the passports. They buy the visas that are legitimate. And they can do whatever they want. So, we need to understand the difference.

Once we understand the difference, I think it becomes very clear what we have to do: protect the refugees. Protect them. Don't leave them on the bridge to go into heat stroke. Don't leave them to miscarry a child after you've been gang-raped. I mean, what are we thinking that we would declare war and bring down total abuse on people that have just run for their lives?

AMY GOODMAN: In the countries they're mainly running from—Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala—

JENNIFER HARBURY: And much of Mexico.

AMY GOODMAN: And Mexico.

JENNIFER HARBURY: Much of Mexico, and also parts of Africa—not the cartels there, but genocide and anti-gay stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: In places like Honduras, where the U.S.—back to when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the U.S. supported a coup in Honduras. And then, even the Organization of American States saying the last election was not legitimate, the U.S. continues to support that government. How does that link, what's happening there, to the violence there?

JENNIFER HARBURY: We keep supporting our military allies. It was President Otto Pérez Molina in Guatemala, was one of the intelligence leaders responsible for my husband's three years of torture. And they knew that when he was running for office, and the State Department still covered for him, saying he was a reformist, for example. But what we're doing is we're—through our intelligence agencies, we're still giving massive support and protection to keep these military units in place and in total power over each of these countries, so that they'll do what we want with their countries. And in return, we cast a blind eye. Well, they set up these hideous drug-running cartels that are chasing these people up here and which eventually are going to land right here. And there already are signs of that in Texas. And if we haven't done our part to put those people in prison by releasing our files and halting military support for them, through elections and otherwise, then we're going to get what we deserve.

AMY GOODMAN: Human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury. I spoke to her on the border in Brownsville, Texas, last week. This is Democracy Now!I'm Amy Goodman.

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