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Illustration: Frankly, I'm not sure this means anything, but I'm sure the Bush administration did not weep.Some Thoughts on CensorshipThen More on Iraq By Honest Charlie This announcement below is from an alternate site that I used to use a great deal but which is now a backup. I tried to find out which post it was that was so offensive, but had no luck. I can not remember ever using vulgar language or making sexual allusions, so it can't be that. Once Facebook took down one post I made when Sarkozy (now off to prison, I think) and Hillary especially, were excited to see Gaddafy butchered. I simply posted a factual and brief biography. Perhaps calling it Gaddafy the Cool is what caused the problem. At any rate, the next day I riposted it and it remained. That was it and nobody even seemed to notice it. Notices (1) This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger's Community Guidelines All (2,110) MANAGE So, anyway, you have been warned and have to state you are 18 or above to read it. I have no idea, however, what it's title is. Very puzzling, to say the least, as are all the examples herein. The statement below may lead to repercussions for the writer as she does not use ZIONIST to distinguish and thus isolate the religious from the political. But, we shall see. I shall warn her. Your new Far right Israeli friends @RishiSunak @JamesCleverly If you sup with the devil you need a long spoon. Jewish radicals attack Jerusalem's Church of Gethsemane during Sunday's worship Well, I warned her and she said she quoted someone who was Jewish and wrote about Israel. (In fact, he writes about the entire Mid-East and is almost always right). Thus my good deed for the Month. This is my temporary, soon to become, no doubt, permanent banishment from one of the Social Media discussion sub-sites. I quite frankly can not figure out what I said that was so "unkind" (is their word for it) to this group of technophiles. The offending comment, I imagine, I made was to one entry in a massive debate or discussion. The string of comments in that string were so numerous that a switch (binary type, not equestrian) was employed to prevent any more than one comment from any single person until five minutes had passed. I imagine the problem had something to do with employing some sort of psychological or political verity in the discussion, but I have no real idea. The only specific response I got from anyone there was that I asked about the print spool some time ago, and that was not the issue. I do remember once a while ago mentioning a parody of a Senator from, I believe Kentucky, asking how big an algorithm was "bigger than a breadbox"? Someone told me that he had gone to college, so I guess that put me in my place. Still, that was not the "unkindness" involved. Just to end this part, I remember telling a Trumpnick that Donald was singled out by the perceptive Richard Nixon as having real potential as a politician. When asked about this, back in those days, he said "If I did run, it would be as a Republican as more of those voters are stupid." I heard him saying it a long time ago and also quoted in print somewhere, but not think that four or more decades later I would need documentation. I do know that it was not on one of his frequent appearances on the Howard Stern show. (As I've said in a previous post, unlike Donald, Howard grew up with the help of a therapist.) Here is the documentation from that group: Admin feedback An admin turned off your ability to post and comment. You won't be able to do these actions until Apr 15 at 5:53 PM. Group rules that were violated 1Be Kind and Courteous We're all in this together to create a welcoming environment. Treat everyone with respect. Debates are natural, but kindness is required. Read the code of conduct: http://codeofconduct.2600.ninja It's a very strange date as it seems to have something to do with the Federal Income Tax, the day set in an early version of it during the Roosevelt Administration. Be that as it may, we have more important things to point out. Just a quick note: MAGA stands for MAKE ATTORNEYS GET ATTORNEYS. TranscriptThis is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: As we continue to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we're joined by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an award-winning Iraqi journalist and author. He was born in Baghdad in 1975 and was working as an architect when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Ghaith started his journalism career at The Guardian soon after the invasion as a translator for Guardian reporters. He has since received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, the British Press Awards' Foreign Reporter of the Year and the Orwell Prize. His book is just out on this 20th anniversary, A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is joining us from Istanbul, Turkey, today. Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Ghaith. This book is magnificent. It is a deep dive into understanding the effects of an invasion and occupation and, beyond that, the entire region. And we congratulate you for this work. Why don't we start off with the book's title, A Stranger in Your Own City? Describe Baghdad, a place you had hardly left by the time you had become an architect, and then what happened on March 20th, the bombing of your country. GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: Well, thank you, Amy, and thank you, Nermeen, for having me back. It's exactly like that. I grew up in Baghdad. I rarely left the city for 28 years. And I presume I knew the city very well. I used to walk everywhere. My school was in one part of the city. My family lived in another part. My friends are in the east and the west of the city. So I knew the geography of the city very well. It's a flat, open city, no marcations, no boundaries within the city itself. And then, within two years of the occupation, I was awake early in the morning in my hotel room, and I'm trying to find friends who can escort me to different parts of the city. And that's when it hit me that I have become a stranger in my own city, because I can't actually, literally, travel from the hotel where I was staying to where my school was or where my friends were, without having a someone to escort me, and often two people escorting me, you know, because you never know what kind of militia will be manning checkpoints on the road. And that was a direct effect of the war. I mean, my life, from an architect or a journalist, an accidental journalist, I would say, was upended by this war like so many other lives in Iraq, and in the region, of course. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ghaith, one of the things that's very instructive and interesting in your book is the account you give of your years in Baghdad — as you said, almost 30 without barely leaving — all of the events that led up to what the society and the context was in which the U.S. invasion took place. So, if you could begin with that? You were 5 years old when the Iraq-Iran War began, and then followed swiftly by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the sanctions. If you could just walk us through that period and what Baghdad was like in those years? GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: I mean, of course, Iraqis, and myself included, of a certain generation, their relationship to war did not start in 2003. As you said, I was 5 when I first time witnessed the bombing of my city. It was — you know, Iraq was bombing Tehran. The Iranians were bombing Baghdad. And that eight years' war, that although people in the cities, the major cities, were spared from, but we all lived through its dynamic, through its impact of the society, the militarization of the society — uncles, cousins, neighbors all being taken to the front. Every spring, you see the streets in Baghdad covered in this black cloth announcing the death of soldiers, conscript soldiers, at the front. So, that was part of the dynamic. And, of course, we all know, during these eight years, Saddam was, you know, supported by the West. He was the darling of the West. He was given weapons, he was given intelligence, because he was serving a purpose. And then, of course, that militarization of the society, that war, led to Saddam's disastrous, foolish, criminal decision to invade Kuwait, which led to the 1991 war. And I have to say the bombing of 1991 really destroyed Baghdad, really destroyed the infrastructure of the country. So, our relationship with America did not start in 2003. We've already been bombed by the Americans in 1991, then the sanctions. And in all the wars I've witnessed, as a civilian Iraqi, as a journalist who later went to report on wars, I've never seen anything devastating on a society like the sanctions. It crushed the Iraqi society. It turned a proud, educated nation into a nation of hustlers, basically, everyone trying to get a job, everyone trying to get a little bit of money. And that enshrined the corruption, which we see its results now. You know, when you see the salaries of a teacher dropping into $2, a policeman getting $5, corruption becomes a way of survival. AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you — GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: That destruction of the society — AMY GOODMAN: I — GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: — was a prelude — AMY GOODMAN: Ghaith, I wanted to — GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: Sorry. AMY GOODMAN: — stick to that issue of sanctions, the way the president of the United States perceived them and the absolutely devastating effect in Iraq. On Election Day in 2000, I had a chance to speak with President Bill Clinton, who called in to our radio station, Pacifica Radio, WBAI, to get out the vote. So I had a chance to question him about the effect of sanctions in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: "They're wrong," President Clinton said. And, of course, there was the famous comment of Madeleine Albright, when questioned by Judy Woodruff of 60 Minutes about 500,000 children dying as a result of the sanctions, did she think the price was worth it, and she said yes. Your response, and for people to understand the effect of these sanctions alone? GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: I mean, I can't emphasize the impact of the sanctions. I think everything that has happened in Iraq in the last 30 years, through the life of this dictator, his adventures, the occupation that followed, the sectarian politics, it was the sanctions — that is the moment when you destroyed society. Look, during the sanctions, Saddam and his private clique, they didn't suffer. I mean, they were wealthy. Saddam went on building his palaces. His clan, his people close to him survived. Actually, they benefited even more, because, because of the sanctions, there was a very important black market. They controlled the black market. And they became wealthy, like it's happening in other different countries as we speak at the moment. The people close to the power, they benefit from the sanctions, because they become the only gate through which any source of income can be generated. It's us, as the Iraqis. It's the people who go to these hospitals, and there are no medicine. You go to schools, and there are no pencils, no books. I mean, literally, I and my friends were scavenging through the drawers of architectural school looking for used paper so they can use them on the back, because we don't have access to these things. You know, Saddam's children did not need papers. They didn't go scavenging for pencils. It's us. It's us who lived through these things. It's us who are dependent on this meager monthly ration given by the state. So, I mean, the delusion — I don't know it's delusional or it's deliberate — destruction of a society. And then you come in 2003, after all these things, after all — you know, the Iraqis looked at the Americans as the people who were causing, imposing these sanctions. 2003 happened, and yet there was a moment in which the Iraqis, I think, had this Faustian deal and thought, "OK, we don't want war. We don't want to be bombed again. But we don't want Saddam. Let's see what's going to happen." And what's happened is a civil war on such a magnitude that 20 years later — and this is the sad story about Iraq — 20 years later, people are yearning to the dictator. They think, "Oh, the days of the dictator were days of peace and prosperity and whatnot." And this is a direct outcome of the disasters that unfolded since 2003. The unimaginable happened, that led people to yearning to a strong dictator. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ghaith, yes, we'll just turn to that now, what followed the invasion of 2003. But if you could elaborate on that? You argue in the book that — and as you've said just now — that Saddam Hussein was not weakened — if anything, he was strengthened, his regime was strengthened — by the sanctions, even as millions of Iraqis suffered these devastating consequences. And you also say that the quality of his rule changed. I'll just quote a line from your book to you. You say, "The old obsolete revolutionary images of pan-Arabism and socialism were replaced by a new set of values based on Islam and the tribe, portraying himself" — that is, Saddam — "as the pious, father-like, tribal sheikh." Could you explain what happened and what that meant for what followed? GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: So, Saddam and the Baath Party, when they came to power in the '60s, the language of the — the narrative of the language was of this national liberation, the language of socialism — I mean, of course, it meant nothing; it was just kind of the theatrics of it — and, you know, supporting anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and all that kind of language. And he and his ministers were always dressed in military uniforms, you know, the sunglasses, the cigar — all the paraphernalia of a revolutionary leader. After 1990 and the invasion of Kuwait, as religiosity spread throughout the Middle East, and not only in Iraq, Saddam had to change the narrative. The party, the security forces were weakened because of the sanctions, because of the bombing, because of the [inaudible]. He needed a new way, a new narrative, to control the society. So, the religion served to — served multi-purposes. A, it created this — in a society that is suffering, the religion was a solace, was a way to find answers against those, you know, Americans who are imposing the sanctions. So that served a purpose. The spread of religious movements in the Middle East, Saddam, by adopting a religious narrative himself, he managed to kind of pull the carpet, basically, from all the Salafi jihadi movements that were spreading around in the region. That, religion, became a way to control the society — the mosques, the network of preachers. But also the tribes became another method to control the society. Where he cannot send his weakened security forces, he can depend on — what's the word? — faithful loyalists, loyalist tribes, tribe elders. And that happened all over Iraq, not in a specific region, not to a specific sect. Suddenly, Iraq moved from a secular, whatever, country, adopting secular rhetoric, let's say, into a country adopting tribal and religious rhetoric. That religious rhetoric, of course, it did — Saddam did not allow any extremist religious movement to exist in the country, Sunni or Shia, because any political formation would threaten his rule. But that religious narrative, that religious rhetoric allowed, created the basis upon which both Sunni and Shia religious movements emerged after 2003 to oppose the Americans and fight the jihad against the Americans. NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, let's go to that moment, when the Americans come in. You describe a scene in the book when you see an American marine covering a statue of Saddam Hussein with the American flag. So, if you could respond to that? I mean, explain what your response and the response of others there was to that, and then the fact that you yourself, a few days after the invasion, you were arrested. Explain what happened. GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: So, you know, I was in my neighborhood, in my house. I saw the Americans there, and I followed them, like many Iraqis, and stood in the square. We saw the statue being toppled — toppled by the Marines, by the way, not by the Iraqis. Iraqis couldn't bring it down, so the Marines pulled their vehicle, tied the noose, pulled the statue. And then we all saw on TV this iconic image of this U.S. marine pulling a U.S. flag from his pocket and covering the face of the statue with it. And, of course, at that time, there was this kind of collective gasp of, "Oh my god! What are you doing? You know, at least allow this — the charade of liberation to last for a day." Later, I came to realize that that American marine was a very honest person. I mean, he, unlike all the generals and the politicians and the people in the Pentagon and George W. Bush, who talked about liberating Iraq and liberation, that marine saw the war as it was, as a war between the United States, between his army, and the Iraqis. The Iraqis were defeated, and he was victorious. It was his — in that act, he was more honest in reflecting the realities of the ground, because that quickly became the reality on the ground. Those soldiers were no longer liberators. I mean, that facade of liberation probably lasted for a day. But very soon you see them pointing their guns, manning checkpoints. Like all arrogant hubris empires throughout histories, once you send your soldiers into, you know, occupying another foreign land, the soldiers, the young people, who have no idea, if never exposed, they will see all the Iraqis as their enemies. I mean, look at the previous segment. They see part of their own society as the enemy. Imagine how they saw us Iraqis. A few months later, I was driving back with another Iraqi friend. It was the day Saddam was arrested. We were stopped at an American checkpoint, Army checkpoint, at night. They were suspicious of us. Why are two Iraqis driving at night? Because it's our country. And then we were put in jail. We were released next day, but as I woke up in the morning — we slept in this bare, former Iraqi military police cell. The irony of it — I, someone who had dodged the Iraqi military police for five years, end up in their cell by my supposed liberators. But this next morning, they take us to a yard, and there's a long line of Iraqis. We're all crouching on the ground, some of us blindfolded, others not. That was the face of the supposed liberation, which was never liberation. It became occupation very, very quickly. And, of course, insurgency starts, for whatever reasons — some jihadi, religious, some nationalist. They fight against the Americans. The Americans will behave — you know, they will — one village, a few people fight from one village. Thanks to American policies, by rounding up men, by putting them in detention, by humiliating, by breaking into houses, you will see the whole village, and then the whole community, and then the whole province fighting against the Americans. So it was doomed from day one. There was no scenario in which an American Army, with all its legacies in Iraq, in the Middle East, in the region, can transform that adventure, which soon it called it occupation, with all the connotation of the word "occupation" in the Middle East — turned it into something else. And that's the disaster that led. AMY GOODMAN: Ghaith, I wanted to stick with April 9th, 2003, that day that the statue of Saddam Hussein was brought down. I remember CNN so clearly. You have CNN domestic and CNN International. On CNN International, they were showing a split screen of the statue coming down, repeated over and over again. Of course, the marine was just outside the frame. It looked like Iraqis brought down that statue. But on the other side were the casualties of war. Now, CNN domestic had the same access to that video, but that's not what they were showing. They were just showing Saddam Hussein's statue coming down. In the same way, on March 20th, "shock and awe," Americans love fireworks, and that's exactly what it looked like. So you see the bombs in the sky, and you see a statue coming down, but not the casualties of war. Can you talk about what that was on the ground — ultimately, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died — and how that led to, as you talk about, the rise of ISIS? What everyone thought in the United States, there's this huge division between Sunni and Shia. You said you didn't even want to ask that question to people when you were translating for other journalists, because you said you didn't often know who was Sunni or who was Shia growing up, that this was also aggravated in a fractured society by the occupation and invasion. GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: So, to go back to that kind of point about the CNN and the domestic CNN, in 2005, I came to New York for the first time in my life. And I switched on the TV, and I — you know, 2005, Baghdad was burning. In the fighting, the insurgency, Americans were dying every day. And I thought, like, I would see this kind of war being broadcasted daily to the American audience. And there was nothing. There was nothing. I don't remember the channels on local TV in New York, but there was nothing, as if, you know, the life was going on. I come from Iraq. Your country has been occupying my country. There was nothing. Anyhow, the point is, after 2004 — 2003, the 9th of April, that occupation, with all its problems, did not stop there. It created its own dynamic within the society. With the occupation came a group of exiled Iraqi politicians who had evolved their sectarian political thoughts in exile, in kind of very claustrophobic, very traumatized places, in Tehran, in London. They have all lost people. They have all lost friends and cousins. So they saw the regime, they saw Iraq, in this binary way of Sunnis versus Shia. And because they were outside the country, they were isolated from the country, so we never had any connections with them. The way they saw the invasion — and let's remember that kind of the regime change in Iraq started in the mid-'90s, late '90s, with the Iraq, whatever, act in 1998. So it did not start in 2003. The narrative that was sold to the Americans was a narrative of a part of the society dominated by another part of the society. And that was criminal, a horrible way of thinking of the Iraqi society. I grew up in Baghdad. I don't want to say there are no Sunnis or Shia or Kurds. I don't want to say there is no oppression against political Shia parties. I don't want to say that we were all equal. But it was not a sectarian regime. It was a Saddam, his clan and his tribe regime that dominated. And in the army, some Sunni officers in the army tried to topple Saddam in the '90s. So, the narrative that was sold was a sectarian narrative. And, of course, in every narrative based on victimhood, if one part of the population are victims, then the others are the victimizers. When the Americans came, they saw Saddam as a Sunni, so, by association, every single Sunni in Iraq became tainted by the regime, was pushed into a corner. The process of de-Baathification, of purging the army — or, kind of the army was totally disbanded — all these policies were directed against the Sunnis. So, of course, what do the Sunnis do, who had never a communal identity of themselves? They are pushed into a corner, and they had to reject this American adventure in Iraq, this American occupation in Iraq. The lack of security in Iraq after 2003 allowed everyone who had grievances against the Americans to flood into Iraq, and that includes the jihadis but also includes the Iranian establishment, who wanted to defeat the Americans in Iraq because they were the second on the "axis of evil." All these different elements led to the establishment of a civil war. In the common narrative of Iraq, people talk about the civil war as it happened in 2005 after the bombing of the Shia shrines in Samarra. For me, personally, I think civil war, in terms of fighting, in terms of killing, started early in 2004. But also, the civil war starts in a society not when men carry guns, but when the society is divided between us and them. That is a prelude to a civil war. And, of course, that civil war, you know, coupled with corruption of the Iraqi establishment, with the sectarianism of the Iraqi security forces, led eventually to the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, because — who were benefiting from the chaos in the region to reestablish their alliances. NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ghaith, could you say, because you also — just to go back, you attended Saddam Hussein's trial. Could you describe the scene at that trial and what you think the repercussions were of how that trial was conducted for what followed? GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: You know, Nermeen, the problem with Iraq is we don't know the history, and we don't know our history. We still don't know why Saddam started the war against Iran. We still don't know what are the dynamics, what are the policies that led him to invade Kuwait and all the madness and upheaval that we lived through after that. So, I thought, finally, here is Saddam on trial. Why don't we do an international tribunal? Why don't we put him in front of U.N., like what happened in Bosnia and Serbia and other countries? But, no, because of the Iraqi politicians, the sectarian Iraqi politicians did not want — and the Americans, both of them — the Iraqi sectarian politicians did not want to hand him to the U.N., because he will not be executed, of course. And he was going to be executed, regardless of the result of the trial. And the Americans, who didn't want — didn't want to hand anything to the U.N., didn't want any U.N. involvement. And probably the U.N. didn't want to be involved in that project itself. Instead, what did we have? Instead of Saddam being put on trial in front of the Iraqi people and us knowing what he did and why he did that to our community, to our life, to our society — instead, we have a charade of a trial in which Saddam not only emerged as this hero in the Arab world, he exonerates himself. He reinvents himself as this dignified man carrying his Qur'an, going there in front of a bunch of, you know — I don't know how to describe them. It's just like a circus court, a charade. The Americans, through that trial, turned Saddam into a hero in the Arab world, in an Arab world defeated, looking for a savior, for a hero. And they look at him. So, since then, you drive in the streets of Amman, Kabul, Sana'a, you always see a picture of Saddam on the back of, you know, taxi windows. Why? Because he was reinvented for them, thanks to that kind of trial, thanks to the charade of the trial. And, of course, we never got any reason. But then, of course, what happened with his execution, in mutilating his corpse, and the sense of — iihana, we call it in Arabic — it's to defeat a defeated segment of the society. It was all playing into the sectarian narrative. AMY GOODMAN: Ghaith, we don't have much time, but I wanted to ask you: 20 years later, what do you want the world to understand about the U.S. invasion, about your country Iraq, and if you have any hope at this point? GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: Amy, I just want accountability. I don't want people to go to jail. I don't want people to, when they die, that — I want accountability. I want all the people who executed this war, who planned this war, the people who murdered Iraqi civilians, be it Americans or be it Iraqis themselves, you know, militia commanders, politicians, I want all those people held accountable — accountable not to go to jail or shot and executed, no. I want the history to be told properly, so that people in Iraq now, 20 years later, can have a peace of mind, can have a moment of reconciliation with themselves. This is what we are lacking. I mean, you look at Iraq now. What is Iraq now, 20 years later? It's a very wealthy country, $100 billion, $120 billion a year. And yet parts of Baghdad and parts of the south of the country are really poor, in wretched state. And you look at the Iraqi political establishment, and you see many people there who still command militias, who had committed atrocities during the civil war, who led to the death of thousands of people, and they're there sitting in the parliament or appearing on TV every day. Why? Because there is no accountability. Same thing with your country. I mean, people are either dying peacefully or going to paint and reinventing themselves as ski resort trainers and whatnot. This is a disaster. You know, all these lives, Iraqi and American, by the way, are lost, are wasted for nothing. And accountability. AMY GOODMAN: Ghaith, we have to leave it there, but we're going to do Part 2 and post it at democracynow.org. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, his new book, A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War. I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. 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.
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Friday, March 24, 2023
Fwd: 20 YEARS IRAQ -- CENSORSHIP
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
powell2 -- free note
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THE ABSURD TIMES
A little late, but it makes the point.
Well, I guess I have to get this out of my system before I finish what I was about to send out. That fact that Colin Powell was black, or African American, or Jamacian American, in no way excuses his role in supporting the war on Iraq. The sources he claimed to have as "solid" were confessions obtained through torture and some German, somewhere. He probably didn't know this, so we don't know what he would have done if he did. He was also praised for his "service" in Viet Nam. OK, so he is not one of my heros.
However, what is being done in his name is pretty disgusting even for the republicans. Yes, he finally died of covid and had been vaccinated, but he also had a severe disease that affected the immune system, it was terminal in itself, and also was afflicted with Parkinson's, although that has not been expanded on and it doesn't matter if it is. But for our media to just put it out there and leave the impression that vaccination leads to death is, well, an american failing, again.
His Chief of Staff Wilkerson has done a good jon of showing how he was used by Cheney, Bush, and others and we refer you to him. Meanwhile, here is a transcript. I'd ask for further distribution, but save that for the next issue (which has been rudely interrupted by this development):
We look at the life and legacy of Colin Powell, who is best known for giving false testimony to the U.N. Security Council in 2003 about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, paving the way for the U.S. invasion and occupation that would kill over 1 million Iraqis. Powell, who was the first Black secretary of state, the first Black and youngest chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first Black national security adviser, died on Monday due to blood cancer and Parkinson's disease that left him vulnerable to infection from COVID-19. Tributes poured in from top U.S. leaders in both Republican and Democratic circles on Monday, but in other parts of the world Powell is remembered very differently. We speak with journalist and author Roberto Lovato, and Clarence Lusane, activist, journalist and political science professor at Howard University. Lusane describes Powell as "a complicated political figure who leaves a complicated legacy" whose public image was "in conflict with many of the policies of the party he supported and the administration in which he was involved." Assessing Powell's role in U.S. invasions around the world, from Vietnam to Central America, Lovato says "he's made a career out of being a good soldier and supporting U.S. mass murder around the world, but evading the credit for it."
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GUESTS
author, activist, journalist and professor at Howard University, where he is director of the International Affairs Program and former chair of the Department of Political Science.
award-winning journalist and author.
LINKS
"Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas"
"Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century"
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: President Biden ordered flags at the White House to be flown at half-staff in honor of General Colin Powell, who died Monday at the age of 84. Powell was the first Black secretary of state, the first Black and youngest chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first Black national security adviser. On Monday, tributes poured in from both Republican and Democratic leaders. President Biden called Powell a, quote, "patriot of unmatched honor and dignity."
But in other parts of the world, Powell is remembered very differently. In Iraq, the journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who famously threw a shoe at President George W. Bush, tweeted that he was sad Powell had died before being tried for his crimes in Iraq. While serving as secretary of state under Bush, General Powell played a pivotal role in paving the way for the U.S. invasion. It was February 5th, 2003, that Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council and made the case for a first strike on Iraq. Powell's message was clear: Iraq possessed extremely dangerous weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein was systematically trying to deceive U.N. inspectors by hiding the prohibited weapons.
SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL: One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents. Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.
AMY GOODMAN: All of Colin Powell's main claims about weapons of mass destruction turned out to be false. He later described the speech as a "blot" on his record.
But the 2003 speech was not the first time General Powell had falsely alleged Iraq had WMDs. In 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. bombed Iraq's only baby formula factory. At the time, General Powell said, quote, "It is not an infant formula factory. … It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure," he said. Well, U.N. investigators later confirmed the bombed factory was in fact making baby formula.
While many in Iraq consider Powell to be a war criminal, just like they consider George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Powell has long been celebrated at home. Colin Powell was born in Harlem in 1937. His parents had both immigrated from Jamaica. He was educated in public schools, including City College of New York, before he joined the military through ROTC. He served two tours in Vietnam. He was later accused of helping to whitewash the My Lai massacre, when U.S. soldiers slaughtered up to 500 villagers, most of them women and children and the elderly. While investigating an account of the massacre filed by a soldier, Powell wrote, quote, "In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent," he said.
Powell spent 35 years in the military, rising to chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the 1980s, he helped shape U.S. military policy in Latin America at a time when U.S.-backed forces killed hundreds of thousands of people in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and other countries. Powell also helped oversee the U.S. invasion of Panama and the Persian Gulf War.
From 2001 to 2005, he served as secretary of state under George W. Bush. After working under three Republican presidents, General Powell made headlines in 2008 when he endorsed Barack Obama for president just two weeks before Election Day. Earlier this year, General Powell said he no longer considered himself a Republican, following the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
General Colin Powell died on Monday. His family said he died from COVID-19 complications. He was struggling with both Parkinson's disease and multiple myeloma, which left him severely immunocompromised.
To talk more about Powell's life and legacy, we're joined by two guests. Roberto Lovato is with us, award-winning journalist, author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. He has closely tracked General Powell's history in Latin America. We're also joined by Clarence Lusane, professor at Howard University. He's author of many books, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century.
Professor Lusane, let's begin with you. If you can talk about the legacy of Colin Powell?
CLARENCE LUSANE: Thank you, Amy. And thank your other guests.
So, Powell leaves a very — he was a complicated political figure who leaves a complicated legacy. As you outlined in your introduction, Powell has a rise-from-the-bottom story that really captured the imagination of many people. He rose from growing up in poor areas, or at least low-income areas, in New York to become fourth in line to president, when he became the secretary of state.
In the early 1990s, he was championed by both Democrats and Republicans and recruited by both to run for president. He declined in 1995. And when he declined, he announced that he was joining the Republican Party. Now, the Republican Party he joined in 1995 was the Republican Party of Newt Gingrich, and it did not seem to be a fit. Colin was pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-immigration, called for gun control, all of which the Republican Party, under Newt Gingrich and going forward, have been against.
As you point out, he joins the George W. Bush administration, the very first choice, in fact, of George W. Bush for his Cabinet because Powell has the international gravitas and respect that nobody else in and around George W. Bush has. But he never really fit in. And in the first eight or nine months of the George W. Bush administration, Powell lost fight after fight after fight when Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and others, who were what we call the neoconservatives, the neocons, were really running the administration. And there was a pretty good bet that Powell was not going to last until the end of the year. But then September 11 happens. Powell, always the loyal soldier, decides to stay, but he's still very isolated. He says that they basically saw him as a milk carton. They put him in the refrigerator, and when they needed him, they would bring him off the shelf, and then they would put him back. They brought him off the shelf in 2003 to talk at the U.N. because there was no one else in the administration who could get the attention and at least some belated respect. And Colin Powell went and gave that talk, which was, from A to Z, false. But he was the only one in the administration, and then, of course, a year and a half later, he's gone.
But he's complicated because, in many ways, he did not fit in with the Republican Party, even though he did not leave until early this year. But he increasingly, and anyone who was a moderate, and particularly Black moderates, simply had no place in the Republican Party. And so, he endorses Obama, he endorses Biden, he endorses Hillary Clinton — or at least he votes for them. So he really had moved and been moved out of the Republican Party for many years. But he really wasn't a Democrat or seen as a progressive, either, again, because of a long history of aggression internationally, going all the way back to Reagan and the Contras and all of the foreign policy controversies of the 1980s, and then under the Bush administration, which not only included Iraq but also included the Bush policies towards Cuba, towards Venezuela, their policies around Africa, all of which increasingly isolated Colin Powell from the progressive communities.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Professor, I wanted to ask you, in terms of the need for both the Democrats and the Republicans to repeatedly lionize and hold up General Powell especially, but then as Secretary of State Powell, as a key and important American speaker, given the fact that the U.S. military — of all the institutions in American society, none is more racially diverse, it seems to me, than the U.S. military, with about 40% or more than 40% of the troops as people of color. So, could you talk about the importance of Powell as a figure, given the demographics and the changes in the American military?
CLARENCE LUSANE: Thanks, Juan.
So, part of the capital that Colin Powell bills is precisely because he rises up to the top of an institution, one of the few that had not seemed to be tainted by political partisanship, and he rises up and becomes the head, becomes the head of Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Powell's personality is not a belligerent one, one that we have, unfortunately, come to see more and more in military figures and political figures, and Powell's activism relative to addressing issues of race. So, when we think of the conservative African Americans who are in and around the Republican Party — the Clarence Thomases, the Candace Owens — those types tend to come to mind. But there were African American conservatives who took positions that were supportive of issues related to the Black community and were active and supportive of civil rights. So, Powell fits into that, and so that gave him some cachet. He spoke at my graduation at Howard University in 1994 and talked about issues of racism, issues of being socially engaged. You're not going to find that coming from virtually any of the people we think of as Black Republicans these days. So, that gave Colin Powell a different kind of public-facing image, which was in conflict, again, with many of the policies in the party that he supported and in the administration in which he was involved.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I'd like to also bring in Robert Lovato into the discussion. And, Roberto, I'm wondering if you could talk especially about — people forget that back in the invasion of Panama that not only was Colin Powell a key figure, but that the secretary of defense at the time was Dick Cheney.
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah. Thank you, Juan and Amy. I'm glad to be back with you.
The story of Colin Powell in Central America and other parts of the world is what I would call a tragic tale of militarism in the service of declining empire. And it also previews what I call the age of intersectional empire, that Clarence laid out a little bit of, in terms of how race is being deployed by the militaristic, bipartisan consensus elites in the United States. And so, Panama comes about, remember, right after the Central America engagements in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and that was preceded by the Vietnam War, when you have a decline in the morale and the sensibilities of the U.S. military, having suffered a defeat, a severe defeat, in Vietnam. And so, Powell was part of a cadre of leaders trying to figure out how to create a post-Vietnam animus for the U.S. military machine.
But one thing I want to make clear is that the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, bringing in the public into supporting U.S. war, clearly defined national security objectives and other things that define what they call the Powell-Weinberger doctrine, are still war policies. And so, Colin Powell's political career was one thing, in terms of race and being pro-abortion, but in terms of militarism, it was clear. In El Chorrillo neighborhood, which taxi drivers in Panama still call the "little Hiroshima," you know, hundreds of people were killed. They're still excavating mass grave sites of the invasion of Panama. And so, you know — and prior to that, remember, Powell was an assistant to then-secretary of defense, under the Reagan administration, Caspar Weinberger, who was charged with looking — overseeing military policy in Central America, which, instead of going into what they called asymmetrical warfare, like they did in Vietnam and got beat up, the militarists, like Colin Powell, decided to stray away from those kinds of war and fight them through proxies, and instead focus on building up to get big, you know, state-to-state military wars. And so, the fight against Manuel Noriega, also on false pretenses, was a preview and a preparation for the state-to-state war that followed in Kuwait and Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: And in that U.S. invasion of Panama that he spearheaded, can you talk about who died, Clarence Lusane, in Panama? We're not just talking about abstract, intellectual, you know, policy issues.
CLARENCE LUSANE: No, that's exactly right, as Ron [sic] laid out. I actually went to Panama. I went with another reporter, Stan Woods from out of Chicago. We went down after the invasion, and it was horrific. As was mentioned, there were mass graves. There were the total destruction of neighborhoods. They bombed — these were poor neighborhoods, we should be clear. So, there were wealthy neighborhoods that were surgically missed, while they bombed neighborhoods that had not only been active, but had been — you know, very much embodied people who live there. So, it was a horrific invasion. And Powell said nothing about it. It was similar to other military endeavors by the Bush administration and Reagan administration. Powell was silent on the consequences that thousands and thousands and thousands of people — and hundreds of thousands of people died in Iraq, but certainly thousands of people died in Panama. And there still has not been an accounting for that particularly horrible invasion.
AMY GOODMAN: And these were a heavily Black population of Panama.
CLARENCE LUSANE: And these were Afro-Panamanians. That's exactly right.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Roberto Lovato, go a little before the invasion of Panama to explain the Iran-Contra deal and the role of General Powell at the time. The invasion of Panama was under George H.W. Bush, and the Iran-Contra deal, of course, was when he was vice president, when it was President Ronald Reagan, the ultimately illegal deal to sell weapons to Iran, take that money and illegally support the Contras, which was against, at the time, the Boland Amendment, that said the U.S. could not support the counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua.
ROBERTO LOVATO: So, Powell, we have to remember, was what he himself called the, quote, "chief administration advocate" for the Contras. The U.S. sponsored an insurgency to try to overthrow the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. I mean, Human Rights Watch and other organizations around the world have documented tens of thousands of people killed, nuns raped, children destroyed by the Contras. And Colin Powell would go on to say that "I have no regrets about my role" and that he fought very hard to get support for the Contras. So, Powell, as assistant secretary to Caspar Weinberger, was privy to information about the arms for hostages and giving money to the Contras deal, but managed to evade judgment, unlike Weinberger, who was indicted and condemned, and then, I believe, pardoned, thanks to lobbying by Colin Powell.
And so, Powell has proven skillful not just in terms of kind of helping reengineer the post-Vietnam military, but he's also been skillful at evading political judgment, as we saw with My Lai, as we see in Iran-Contra. And, you know, having this idea that the one, quote-unquote, "blot" on his record is the lies around Iraq is a travesty, because he's made a career out of, you know, being a good soldier and supporting U.S. mass murder around the world, but evading the credit for it. So, this is — yeah, I'll leave it there.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. And I'm wondering if you could talk, Roberto, a little bit about, for instance, his legacy in terms of arming and training the Salvadoran Army, and including his relation with José Napoleón Duarte, who was the president of El Salvador in the 1980s.
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah. Powell was one of the Reagan administration's point people in Central America and, as the point person, helped to tee up and then legitimate, when necessary, the Salvadoran military dictatorships and the Guatemalan and other militaries in the region that were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents — and so, in the case of Guatemala, like 200,000 or more mostly Mayan Indigenous people. And so, like, in 1983, for example, Powell was part of a fact-finding kind of mission, that included Jeane Kirkpatrick and Weinberger, to go and see if the Salvadoran — to go confirm the Salvadoran military and government were doing the right thing under Duarte. And, you know, they found that they were doing the right thing and that the U.S. should continue heavily funding and training these murderous militaries. He never said anything about the fact that just a year before and a couple of years before, the massacre of El Sumpul, where about 600 people were killed, was perpetrated by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government; the massacre of El Mozote, where a thousand people were killed, an entire town wiped out, half of the victims under age 12, and half of those children under age 12 were under age 6. Powell seemed to have amnesia about that, along with Elliott Abrams, another, I would say, war criminal. And El Calabozo and other massacres were completely ignored.
And so, we see Powell playing a role in Central America over the years, from the early '80s all the way 'til the end of the war. And, you know, Powell was very sophisticated and smart in terms of moving with the times, so that when it called for a hard line at the beginning of the Reagan era, he was there. When it called for — remember, in 1989, the FMLN guerrillas, for example, we launched an offensive in the capital of San Salvador to basically demonstrate to the U.S. government and the Salvadoran government, that it was supporting, that they couldn't defeat the FMLN guerrillas. And so, that worked. It was basically — the offensive showed that the guerrillas were able to enter into the capital and fight on their own terms. So, Powell and the Bush administration, you know, seeing this, pivoted and pushed the Salvadoran government to peace. Now, some historians will call Powell a peacenik almost, a liberal, which, I mean, if you're comparing him to like Alexander Haig or some just uber fascist like that, then, yeah, but in the larger scheme of empire and militarism, Colin Powell has been, you know, was always, a loyal cadre to mass-murdering empire.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let's go back to Colin Powell's 2003 speech at the U.N., where he falsely accused Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction.
SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL: Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.
AMY GOODMAN: All of General Powell's main claims about weapons of mass destruction turned out to be false. But at the time, most of the media took Powell at his word. The invasion of Iraq began six weeks after he made his speech at the United Nations. He himself recognized it was the final nail in the coffin for so many, because he had called himself a "reluctant warrior." He had dragged his feet on the war, and President Bush wanted his support to be the voice and face of this war. In 2013, Democracy Now! spoke to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. Wilkerson helped prepare Powell's infamous U.N. speech, which he later renounced. Wilkerson said Powell himself was suspicious of the intelligence and wanted to delete any reference in the speech to ties between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: The seminal moment, as we were out at Langley and Colin Powell was getting ready to throw everything out of his presentation that had anything to do with terrorism — that is, substantial contacts between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, in particular — as he was getting — he was really angry. He took me in a room by myself and literally attacked me over it. And I said, "Boss, let's throw it out. I have as many doubts about it as you do. Let's throw it out." And so, we made a decision right there to throw it out.
Within 30 minutes of the secretary having made that decision and instructed me to do so, George Tenet showed up with a bombshell. And the bombshell was that a high-level al-Qaeda operative, under interrogation, had revealed substantial contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that is the chief of staff of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is an Army colonel, Lawrence Wilkerson. In 2009, Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy questioned Colin Powell about the false claims he made during the U.N. speech, that was based in part on false information provided by prisoners who had been tortured.
SAM HUSSEINI: General, can you talk about the al-Libi case and the link between torture and the production of tortured evidence for war?
COLIN POWELL: I don't have any details on the al-Libi case.
SAM HUSSEINI: Can you tell us when you learned that some of the evidence that you used in front of the U.N. was based on torture? When did you learn that?
COLIN POWELL: I don't know that. I don't know what information you're referring to, so I can't answer.
SAM HUSSEINI: Your chief of staff, Wilkerson, has written about this.
COLIN POWELL: So what? [inaudible] Mr. Wilkerson.
SAM HUSSEINI: So, you'd think you'd know about it.
COLIN POWELL: The information I presented to the U.N. was vetted by the CIA. Every word came from the CIA. And they stood behind all that information. I don't know that any of them would believe that torture was involved. I don't know that as a fact. There's a lot of speculation, particularly by people who never attended any of these meetings. But I'm not aware of that.
AMY GOODMAN: Clarence Lusane, we're going to give you the final word. Again, this speech, he would late call a "blot" on his career.
CLARENCE LUSANE: So, the thing to remember about that period is that the entire global community was against the invasion. So, when Colin Powell and the Bush administration says that they were vetting this information, they were not listening not only to their allies, they were not listening to what the United Nations itself was actually doing and had essentially proven that there were no weapons of mass destruction. But the administration was determined to go, and Colin Powell basically acceded to that, as he would do both prior to that speech, as he did with the World Conference Against Racism, when the United States and Israel were the only two countries that pulled out, and as he would do after the invasion of Iraq on other policies by the George W. Bush administration, until he was finally driven out. So, there does have to be an accounting for that record. There's no way to kind of pretty it up. It was atrocious. And again, hundreds of thousands — in some estimates, up to a million — people died as a result of that war.
