Editor’s Note: John Wight is a forceful and insightful writer we are always happy to republish for the TGP audience. On this essay, we differ (slightly) on a couple of points which we think bear mentioning, and which we believe John himself, on second thought, might agree. First a minor detail: The Obama-approved CIA program, or the US meddling in Syria did not begin in 2013 but much earlier, certainly by 2011, and probably several years before, as the Assad government had been in Washington/London and Jerusalem’s crosshairs for decades. Second, John seems prepared to believe the New York Times account about the technocratic and, by subtle extension (as phrased by the NYT) even the ethical embarrassment experienced by the CIA and the Obama crowd when they realised—the horror!—that the weapons so formally intended for the semi-imaginary moderate rebels were actually falling in the hands of al-Qaeda and similar zealots. As John in his conclusion correctly notes, the CIA is an amoral, terrorist organization at the service of the US plutocracy and its global allies. It cannot and does not, by definition, entertain moral qualms about such a trifling matter as having brutal proxies of this or that coloration filling the job they wanted done all along: disrupt, dislodge and destroy the Syrian nation, no matter the method, no matter the cost. In sum, what the NYTimes says is pure bollocks; the type of elegant exculpatory version of the story for the consumption of future establishment historians, and the paper’s loyal mass of low-info liberaloid readers. The purpose is and always will be to hide and deny the deep, sociopathic criminality of the US ruling class and its instruments of power.—PG
Imagine, for a moment, if the shoe was on the other foot. Imagine if Russia’s FSB had set up and run such a program, one in support of an armed insurgency dominated by religious extremists with a penchant for torture, enslaving women, and chopping off people’s heads – whose objective was the overthrow of the secular government of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic state – imagine what the reaction would be in Western capitals. The outrage would be stratospheric – and justifiably so.
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We all know that Amazon is an uber-capitalist octopus swallowing ever more industries and openly collaborating with the CIA. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, probably the #2 richest man on earth, is no friend of radicals, or socialist revolution, that's for sure. But this app, ironically, promises to donate some money to whoever uses it to search and make a purchase on Amazon. Since many people will go on using Amazon due to habit or convenience, make it kick back a few dollars our way to continue our pro-peace and anti-imperialist work. Our financial situation leaves us no choice at this point. So consider it. A boycott of Amazon by lefties at this point is hardly going to register on their radar. But any funding we get, at our puny level, will keep us going. Simple as that.
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report