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ACCORDING TO LIZ - No-one wants a Putin-Trump face-off. With the military toys that they command, the results would be fatal. For the planet. For us.
But a war that started in the waning days of the Second World War and continues to rage today threatens all people, here and everywhere.
It is one of ideology and false truths, promulgated by the so-called alphabet agencies around the world.
It stars illegal assassinations and economic takeovers of whole countries. It is an evil game of chess played by clandestine organizations around the world in which ordinary people are seen as pawns to be swept from the board with no regard for our feelings, our health and safety, our rights.
Iran, Vietnam, Chile, Central America, Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia – all have suffered from self-serving and short-sighted meddling, unauthorized by any legal means, mostly to give outside corporations access to raw materials and, in every instance, costing American lives and tax dollars.
Almost 50 years ago the reality of those behind-the-scenes machinations were hauled kicking and screaming out of the closet by the Church Commission but, since then, the perpetrators have made more powerful friends, learned how to better shield their power, and continued to run rampant over the rights granted us all under the American Constitution.
A recent essay by Senator Bernie Sanders published in Foreign Affairs revisited what was revealed by the Church Commission, however briefly, demanding a "revolution in American foreign policy" to replace "greed, militarism, and hypocrisy" with "solidarity, diplomacy, and human rights."
"If the goal of foreign policy is to help create a peaceful and prosperous world, the foreign policy establishment needs to fundamentally rethink its assumptions, spending trillions of dollars on endless wars and defense contracts is not going to address the existential threat of climate change or the likelihood of future pandemics. It is not going to feed hungry children, reduce hatred, educate the illiterate, or cure diseases. It is not going to help create a shared global community and diminish the likelihood of war."
He is far from the first American to demand the dismantling of a foreign policy that has been hyper-focused on the building and strengthening of an American empire in the years following the Second World War. Through overt and covert military operations, and economic oppression that benefits U.S. elites and their multinational corporations.
Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church when the country was still reeling from the revelations of Watergate, the eponymous committee drew back the curtain on abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the Internal Revenue Service.
Against virulent opposition from the alphabet agencies and everyone from Hoover to presidents and their families, Church persevered and at least some oversight procedures were established to control the agencies and also their unsanctioned use by presidents and the Pentagon.
But those powers have been become circumscribed and circumvented over the years and now we have more endless wars unauthorized by Congress, and more presidents who act unilaterally to execute foreign nationals, interfere in foreign countries’ affairs, and supply genocidal leaders with weapons and support.
Part of our corporate-controlled media tries to put the onus on Putin, but he is only using the same tactics on the United States that the CIA honed to wage psychological warfare on the Germans during World War Two, and against the governments of Communist Europe thereafter. Using media to manipulate people’s minds.
Using techniques learned from the Nazis and the Russians – the takeaway being the end justifies the means. But does it?
Such covert machinations have transformed the United States from a force for good, peace and democracy into a power promoting corruption, torture, and death.
And we wonder why billions of people don’t trust our government.
Like Senator Sanders, Senator Church recognized the intrinsic dangers of the enmeshment of corporate economic growth into American foreign policy.
To subsidize the more questionable of their operations put the CIA in bed with multinational corporations that, in too many cases, shared the same goals of domination of foreign governments albeit by economic means. And shared secrets that would make each forever the hostage of the other, sanctioning progressively despicable abuses.
In the Church Committee’s unveiling of America’s scheming and gross manipulations that led to the Vietnam debacle, it revealed the ugly underside of protracted war and manipulated media coverage; that interminable violence only begets more violence and incessant war “becomes the accepted companion of normalcy.”
Today, Putin and others are slavering to get their tentacles into Trump who is already at the whim of domestic/foreign groups due to his personal financial woes – just how much is he on the hook for?
Trump and too many in government are fighting to preserve secrecy at all costs. As the Church Committee learned “once secrecy becomes sacrosanct it invites abuse.”
Hoover kept files on everybody from FDR to MLK in order to leverage his power and covertly control the government. Of course, he couldn’t have done so unless many within the corridors of power shared similar views. But secrets allowed him to throttle challenges and advance the careers of those of a like mind.
Pointing fingers at China and Russia does not make it ok – two wrongs will never make a right any more than might will ever make right.
Buying arms for foreign factions has not brought security for America.
The Global War on Terror was just one manifestation of American abuses – perhaps more visible with the rise of social media – complete with torture, illegal detention, extraordinary rendition, CIA black sites, and the ascendance of Big Brother mass surveillance here at home.
Intervention by the United States abroad has been met with resentment, and continues to drive war not peace – in Yemen, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, in Central and South America…
Recent interventions in Zimbabwe and Niger, both of which ordered American representatives to leave earlier this month for promoting regime change, is eerily reminiscent of outside interference in the Congo in 1960 that ended with the U.S.- and Belgian-facilitated murder and dismemberment of its first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba.
The singular connection between all these places? They are poor with corruptible government officials and, somewhere along the line, multinationals stand to make a profit.
Church believed ceding power over national security to the president could be used to abuse political opponents, shut down dissent, and end democracy.
Sanders saw it as enabling politicians in both parties to use “fear and outright lies to entangle the United States in disastrous and unwinnable foreign military conflicts.”
Only Congress has the right to declare war under the U.S. Constitution. The last time it did so was in 1942.
With Mitch McConnell leading the turnover of the old guard in both the Senate and the House, perhaps it is time for we-the-people to wrest that acquiesced power back and delegate it to more responsible elected officials held to a higher level of transparency and accountability.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
