Turkish protests grow as Erdogan calls counter-demonstrations

By Alex Lantier, wsws.org

Protests against the Islamist government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan grew over the weekend, as Erdogan called counter-demonstrations by his supporters next weekend and warned that his ability to tolerate the protests “has a limit.”

On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters filled Taksim Square in Istanbul, a week after police withdrew from the square after a failed attempt to crush protests against Erdogan’s plans to remodel the historic area in downtown Istanbul. Fans of the Besiktas and Fenerbahce football clubs had called on their supporters to join the demonstration, one of the largest so far on Taksim Square. Protesters chanted, “Erdogan, resign!”

Police and protesters clashed in the western Istanbul neighborhood of Gazi, however, with police firing water cannon after protesters reportedly taunted police.

In the capital, Ankara, police attacked a group of approximately 5,000 protesters Saturday night around 10:30 p.m. in Kizilay Square with barrages of tear gas and water cannon. There were reports of at least two injuries yesterday, after clashes continued in Ankara through the night and into early Sunday morning.

Turkey’s national doctors’ union said the protests had left two protesters and one policeman dead, and almost 4,800 people injured across the country. This figure includes approximately 600 injured police officers.

Protesters held another major rally on Taksim Square yesterday afternoon, as protests continued in cities throughout the country. They chanted, “Erdogan, resign!” and organized songs and dances in various locations on the square.

The Taksim Square rally was called by the Taksim Solidarity Platform—a group of academics, architects, environmentalists, and members of the opposition CHP (Republican People’s Party), who have tried to lay out conditions for a deal with Erdogan to wind down the protests.

The maneuvers of the Taksim Solidarity Platform—and those of the union bureaucracies, pseudo-left groups, and nationalist parties like the CHP—point to critical issues of political perspective confronting the protest movement.

The protests have become the focal point of broader hostility to Erdogan’s policies, including attacks on democratic rights, rising social inequality, and support for the reactionary US-led war in Syria. Numerous commentators have compared the Taksim Square protests in Turkey to the 2011 Tahrir Square protests in Cairo, which launched revolutionary struggles against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Stark differences exist between the two struggles, however. Above all, in February 2011, the working class in Egypt intervened, launching a series of powerful mass strikes that brought down Mubarak. These were directed against Egypt’s state-controlled unions and escaped the control of its opposition parties.

The only way forward for opposition to austerity, war, and democratic rights in Turkey is a fight to similarly mobilize the working class in struggle against the Erdogan regime, independently of and against the unions and the bourgeois opposition. To the extent that the Turkish protests have not advanced such a perspective, they have remained under the political influence of reactionary forces in the union bureaucracy and the CHP. They are seeking a deal with Erdogan to avert a revolution and increase their weight in Erdogan’s maneuvers with imperialism.

Erdogan is seeking to exploit this situation to rally supporters of his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) for a crackdown against the protests. Yesterday the AKP called pro-government counter-demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul for next Saturday and next Sunday, respectively, as Erdogan went on a three-city tour to Mersin, Adana, and Ankara.

In Adana, where a policemen allegedly fell to his death from a bridge while chasing protesters, Erdogan denounced protesters for having “martyred” the policeman.

He also attacked calls for police involved in brutal repression of the protests to resign, slandering protesters as terrorists: “We won’t sacrifice our police to their wishes. We cannot leave the streets for anarchists and terrorists to roam.”

Pro- and anti-Erdogan protesters had clashed the night before, the second such clash after Erdogan supporters attacked a group of protesters in Erdogan’s home city of Rize on Thursday.

Speaking in Ankara as police attacked protesters, Erdogan said: “We remained patient, we are still patient, but there’s a limit to our patience. Those who do not respect this nation’s party in power will pay a price.”

Erdogan also made empty attacks on major banks or governments in North America and Europe, in response to fears that they might place pressure on him to compromise with the protesters, for instance by holding up lending and threatening to increase interest rates on Turkish debt.

He said, “The interest lobby should better behave itself. This lobby exploited my people for years. We have shown patience for a long time. I am not saying this only for one bank or two, but for all whoever is making this lobby. Those who have started this fight against us, you will pay the price heavily. Those who tried to let the stock exchange collapse: Tayyip Erdogan has no money there; if it collapses you will also collapse with it. The moment we discover stock exchange speculation, we will ram it down your throat.”

This is, however, bluster from a government whose foreign policy is closely aligned on Washington’s Middle East wars, above all in Syria, and which depends on international banks to fund Turkey’s current account deficit.

At the same time as Erdogan made these remarks, other Turkish officials cynically sought to dampen down conflicts with the protesters, in line with demands in the Western press.

Istanbul Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu, under whose orders the police brutally attacked protesters last week, issued absurd messages on Twitter to protesters on Taksim Square and nearby Gezi Park: “Young people, I hear you spent a peaceful morning in Gezi Park with bird songs, the buzzing of bees, and the smell of linden trees. I would like to be with you…. Even if we cannot agree with one another, it is obligatory for us to share our problems by looking into our eyes humanely and with justice; every individual is worthy and special.”

Turkish officials also criticized the New York Times ’ decision to run a full-page ad from the Gezi Democracy Movement criticizing Erdogan in its Friday edition. In a letter responding to questions about the ad from the Turkish daily Hurriyet, the Times wrote: “We publish this type of advertising because we believe in the First Amendment, which affords us the right to publish news and editorials, but just as important, guarantees the public’s right to be heard.”

The Times ’ invocation of constitutional rights and freedoms—as it supports the Obama administration, which is escalating domestic spying and building up the apparatus of a police state—is empty and cynical. There can be no question that the Times posted this ad in line with the calculations of sections of the US foreign policy establishment, who hope to use pro-imperialist elements within the protest movement for their own purposes.

As Turkey’s EU Minister Egemen Bagis, a former lobbyist in the United States, sarcastically noted: “When I read the New York Times’ answer with a mention of the First Amendment, I had tears in my eyes, I was really touched.”

Bagis noted that when the Times was approached with plans to carry an ad denying the Armenian genocide in Turkey, it declined to do so.

Noam Chomsky: Are We on the Verge of Total Self-Destruction?

TomDispatch [1] / By Noam Chomsky [2]

TomDispatch.com here [3].

What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now — assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious — and you’re looking back at what’s happening today. You’d see something quite remarkable.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That’s been true since 1945. It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

And there are other dangers like pandemics, which have to do with globalization and interaction. So there are processes underway and institutions right in place, like nuclear weapons systems, which could lead to a serious blow to, or maybe the termination of, an organized existence.

[pullquote] So Kennedy was willing to accept a very high risk of massive destruction in order to establish the principle that we — and only we — have the right to offensive missiles beyond our borders, in fact anywhere we like, no matter what the risk to others — and to ourselves, if matters fall out of control. We have that right, but no one else does. [/pullquote]

How to Destroy a Planet Without Really Trying

The question is: What are people doing about it? None of this is a secret. It’s all perfectly open. In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it.

There have been a range of reactions. There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them. If you look at who they are, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer would see something strange indeed. Trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them, tribal societies and first nations in Canada. They’re not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they’re really trying to do something about it.

In fact, all over the world — Australia, India, South America — there are battles going on, sometimes wars. In India, it’s a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally, but also in their general consequences. In societies where indigenous populations have an influence, many are taking a strong stand. The strongest of any country with regard to global warming is in Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority and constitutional requirements that protect the “rights of nature.”

Ecuador, which also has a large indigenous population, is the only oil exporter I know of where the government is seeking aid to help keep that oil in the ground, instead of producing and exporting it — and the ground is where it ought to be.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died recently and was the object of mockery, insult, and hatred throughout the Western world, attended a session of the U.N. General Assembly a few years ago where he elicited all sorts of ridicule for calling George W. Bush a devil. He also gave a speech there that was quite interesting. Of course, Venezuela is a major oil producer. Oil is practically their whole gross domestic product. In that speech, he warned of the dangers of the overuse of fossil fuels and urged producer and consumer countries to get together and try to work out ways to reduce fossil fuel use. That was pretty amazing on the part of an oil producer. You know, he was part Indian, of indigenous background. Unlike the funny things he did, this aspect of his actions at the U.N. was never even reported.

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible. Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed.

Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call “a century of energy independence” for the United States. Energy independence is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside. What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to destroying the world.

And that’s pretty much the case everywhere. Admittedly, when it comes to alternative energy development, Europe is doing something. Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps 100 relevant ones that doesn’t have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn’t even have renewable energy targets. It’s not because the population doesn’t want it. Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming. It’s institutional structures that block change. Business interests don’t want it and they’re overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.

So that’s what the future historian — if there is one — would see. He might also read today’s scientific journals. Just about every one you open has a more dire prediction than the last.

“The Most Dangerous Moment in History”

The other issue is nuclear war. It’s been known for a long time that if there were to be a first strike by a major power, even with no retaliation, it would probably destroy civilization just because of the nuclear-winter consequences that would follow. You can read about it in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It’s well understood. So the danger has always been a lot worse than we thought it was.

We’ve just passed the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was called “the most dangerous moment in history” by historian Arthur Schlesinger, President John F. Kennedy’s advisor. Which it was. It was a very close call, and not the only time either. In some ways, however, the worst aspect of these grim events is that the lessons haven’t been learned.

[4]What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane. There was a point, as the missile crisis was reaching its peak, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy offering to settle it by a public announcement of a withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey. Actually, Kennedy hadn’t even known that the U.S. had missiles in Turkey at the time. They were being withdrawn anyway, because they were being replaced by more lethal Polaris nuclear submarines, which were invulnerable.

So that was the offer. Kennedy and his advisors considered it — and rejected it. At the time, Kennedy himself was estimating the likelihood of nuclear war at a third to a half. So Kennedy was willing to accept a very high risk of massive destruction in order to establish the principle that we — and only we — have the right to offensive missiles beyond our borders, in fact anywhere we like, no matter what the risk to others — and to ourselves, if matters fall out of control. We have that right, but no one else does.

Kennedy did, however, accept a secret agreement to withdraw the missiles the U.S. was already withdrawing, as long as it was never made public. Khrushchev, in other words, had to openly withdraw the Russian missiles while the U.S. secretly withdrew its obsolete ones; that is, Khrushchev had to be humiliated and Kennedy had to maintain his macho image. He’s greatly praised for this: courage and coolness under threat, and so on. The horror of his decisions is not even mentioned — try to find it on the record.

And to add a little more, a couple of months before the crisis blew up the United States had sent missiles with nuclear warheads to Okinawa. These were aimed at China during a period of great regional tension.

Well, who cares? We have the right to do anything we want anywhere in the world. That was one grim lesson from that era, but there were others to come.

Ten years after that, in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert. It was his way of warning the Russians not to interfere in the ongoing Israel-Arab war and, in particular, not to interfere after he had informed the Israelis that they could violate a ceasefire the U.S. and Russia had just agreed upon. Fortunately, nothing happened.

Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan was in office. Soon after he entered the White House, he and his advisors had the Air Force start penetrating Russian air space to try to elicit information about Russian warning systems, Operation Able Archer. Essentially, these were mock attacks. The Russians were uncertain, some high-level officials fearing that this was a step towards a real first strike. Fortunately, they didn’t react, though it was a close call. And it goes on like that.

What to Make of the Iranian and North Korean Nuclear Crises

At the moment, the nuclear issue is regularly on front pages in the cases of North Korea and Iran. There are ways to deal with these ongoing crises. Maybe they wouldn’t work, but at least you could try. They are, however, not even being considered, not even reported.

Take the case of Iran, which is considered in the West — not in the Arab world, not in Asia — the gravest threat to world peace. It’s a Western obsession, and it’s interesting to look into the reasons for it, but I’ll put that aside here. Is there a way to deal with the supposed gravest threat to world peace? Actually there are quite a few. One way, a pretty sensible one, was proposed a couple of months ago at a meeting of the non-aligned countries in Tehran. In fact, they were just reiterating a proposal that’s been around for decades, pressed particularly by Egypt, and has been approved by the U.N. General Assembly.

The proposal is to move toward establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region. That wouldn’t be the answer to everything, but it would be a pretty significant step forward. And there were ways to proceed. Under U.N. auspices, there was to be an international conference in Finland last December to try to implement plans to move toward this. What happened?

You won’t read about it in the newspapers because it wasn’t reported — only in specialist journals. In early November, Iran agreed to attend the meeting. A couple of days later Obama cancelled the meeting, saying the time wasn’t right. The European Parliament issued a statement calling for it to continue, as did the Arab states. Nothing resulted. So we’ll move toward ever-harsher sanctions against the Iranian population — it doesn’t hurt the regime — and maybe war. Who knows what will happen?

In Northeast Asia, it’s the same sort of thing. North Korea may be the craziest country in the world. It’s certainly a good competitor for that title. But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? Just imagine ourselves in their situation. Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.

Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that, since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply — a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive. The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death. How magnificent! It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.

Let’s turn to the present. There’s an interesting recent history. In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it. Shortly after that, in retaliation, North Korea carried out a minor missile test. The U.S. and North Korea did then reach a framework agreement in 1994 that halted its nuclear work and was more or less honored by both sides. When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

Bush immediately launched his aggressive militarism, threatening North Korea — “axis of evil” and all that — so North Korea got back to work on its nuclear program. By the time Bush left office, they had eight to 10 nuclear weapons and a missile system, another great neocon achievement. In between, other things happened. In 2005, the U.S. and North Korea actually reached an agreement in which North Korea was to end all nuclear weapons and missile development. In return, the West, but mainly the United States, was to provide a light-water reactor for its medical needs and end aggressive statements. They would then form a nonaggression pact and move toward accommodation.

It was pretty promising, but almost immediately Bush undermined it. He withdrew the offer of the light-water reactor and initiated programs to compel banks to stop handling any North Korean transactions, even perfectly legal ones. The North Koreans reacted by reviving their nuclear weapons program. And that’s the way it’s been going.

It’s well known. You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship. What they say is: it’s a pretty crazy regime, but it’s also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy. You make a hostile gesture and we’ll respond with some crazy gesture of our own. You make an accommodating gesture and we’ll reciprocate in some way.

Lately, for instance, there have been South Korean-U.S. military exercises on the Korean peninsula which, from the North’s point of view, have got to look threatening. We’d think they were threatening if they were going on in Canada and aimed at us. In the course of these, the most advanced bombers in history, Stealth B-2s and B-52s, are carrying out simulated nuclear bombing attacks right on North Korea’s borders.

This surely sets off alarm bells from the past. They remember that past, so they’re reacting in a very aggressive, extreme way. Well, what comes to the West from all this is how crazy and how awful the North Korean leaders are. Yes, they are. But that’s hardly the whole story, and this is the way the world is going.

It’s not that there are no alternatives. The alternatives just aren’t being taken. That’s dangerous. So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it’s not a pretty picture. Unless people do something about it. We always can.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch regular [5], he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, including Hopes and Prospects [6], Making the Future [7], and most recently (with interviewer David Barsamian), Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire [4] (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).

[Note: This piece was adapted (with the help of Noam Chomsky) from anonline video interview [8] that Javier Naranjo, a Colombian poet and professor, did for the website What [9], which is dedicated to integrating knowledge from different fields with the aim of encouraging the balance between the individual, society, and the environment.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook [10] or Tumblr [11]. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare. [12]

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[5] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175645/noam_chomsky_the_paranoia_of_the_superrich_and_superpowerful
[6] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1931859965/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[7] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0872865371/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
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[14] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Unusual news: Drone operator, haunted by conscience, comes out of the cold

Former drone operator says he’s haunted by his part in more than 1,600 deaths
Although he’ll probably never be able to wipe clean his feeling of guilt for participating in a vast criminal program, it is highly commendable that, however belatedly, Brandon Bryant’s conscience finally forced him to come out of the shadows. In a sense, like Bradley Manning’s enormous contribution, his revelations shed light on the horrors of what our military and intel agencies are up to in the name of “national security.”

Former drone operator Brandon Bryant tells NBC’s Richard Engel that he felt like he became a “heartless” “sociopath” under the drone program.

By Richard Engel, Chief Foreign Correspondent, NBC News

A former Air Force drone operator who says he participated in missions that killed more than 1,600 people remembers watching one of the first victims bleed to death.

Brandon Bryant says he was sitting in a chair at a Nevada Air Force base operating the camera when his team fired two missiles from their drone at three men walking down a road halfway around the world in Afghanistan. The missiles hit all three targets, and Bryant says he could see the aftermath on his computer screen – including thermal images of a growing puddle of hot blood.

“The guy that was running forward, he’s missing his right leg,” he recalled. “And I watch this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot.” As the man died his body grew cold, said Bryant, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as the ground.

“I can see every little pixel,” said Bryant, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, “if I just close my eyes.”

Bryant, now 27, served as a drone operator from 2006 to 2011, at bases in Nevada, New Mexico and in Iraq, guiding unmanned drones over Iraq and Afghanistan and taking part in missions that he was told led to the deaths of an estimated 1,626 individuals.

In an interview with NBC News, he provided a rare first-person glimpse into what it’s like to control the controversial machines that have become central to the U.S. effort to kill terrorists. [Read: Anyone the psychotic, hypocritical mafia ruling America decides is an “enemy” or a threat of their interests.]

He says that as an operator he was troubled by the physical disconnect between his daily routine and the violence and power of the faraway drones. “You don’t feel the aircraft turn,” he said. “You don’t feel the hum of the engine. You hear the hum of the computers, but that’s definitely not the same thing.”

At the same time, the images coming back from the drones were very real and very graphic.

“People say that drone strikes are like mortar attacks,” Bryant said. “Well, artillery doesn’t see this. Artillery doesn’t see the results of their actions. It’s really more intimate for us, because we see everything.”

A self-described “naïve” kid from a small Montana town, Bryant joined the Air Force in 2005 at age 19. After he scored well on tests, he said a recruiter told him that as a drone operator he would be like the smart guys in the control room in a James Bond movie, the ones who feed the agent the information he needs to complete his mission.

He trained for three and a half months before participating in his first drone mission. Bryant operated the drone’s cameras from his perch at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada as the drone rose into the air just north of Baghdad.

Bryant and the rest of his team were supposed to use their drone to provide support and protection to patrolling U.S. troops. But he recalls watching helplessly as insurgents buried an IED in a road and a U.S. Humvee drove over it.

“We had no way to warn the troops,” he said. He later learned that three soldiers died.

And once he had taken part in a kill, any remaining illusions about James Bond disappeared. “Like, this isn’t a videogame,” he said. “This isn’t some sort of fantasy. This is war. People die.”

Brandon Bryant stands with a Predator drone in Nevada. He says that as an operator he was troubled by the physical disconnect between his daily routine and the violence and power of the faraway drones.

Courtesy Brandon Bryant

Bryant said that most of the time he was an operator, he and his team and his commanding officers made a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties.
[pullquote] “I would’ve been happy if they never even showed me the piece of paper,” he said. “I’ve seen American soldiers die, innocent people die, and insurgents die. And it’s not pretty. It’s not something that I want to have — this diploma.” [/pullquote]

But he began to wonder who the enemy targets on the ground were, and whether they really posed a threat. He’s still not certain whether the three men in Afghanistan were really Taliban insurgents or just men with guns in a country where many people carry guns. The men were five miles from American forces arguing with each other when the first missile hit them.

“They (didn’t) seem to be in a hurry,” he recalled. “They (were) just doing their thing. … They were probably carrying rifles, but I wasn’t convinced that they were bad guys.“ But as a 21-year-old airman, said Bryant, he didn’t think he had the standing to ask questions.

He also remembers being convinced that he had seen a child scurry onto his screen during one mission just before a missile struck, despite assurances from others that the figure he’d seen was really a dog.

After participating in hundreds of missions over the years, Bryant said he “lost respect for life” and began to feel like a sociopath. He remembers coming into work in 2010, seeing pictures of targeted individuals on the wall – Anwar al-Awlaki and other al Qaeda and Taliban leaders — and musing, “Which one of these f_____s is going to die today?”

In 2011, as Bryant’s career as a drone operator neared its end, he said his commander presented him with what amounted to a scorecard. It showed that he had participated in missions that contributed to the deaths of 1,626 people.

“I would’ve been happy if they never even showed me the piece of paper,” he said. “I’ve seen American soldiers die, innocent people die, and insurgents die. And it’s not pretty. It’s not something that I want to have — this diploma.”

Now that he’s out of the Air Force and back home in Montana, Bryant said he doesn’t want to think about how many people on that list might’ve been innocent: “It’s too heartbreaking.”

The Veterans Administration diagnosed him with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, for which he has undergone counseling. He says his PTSD has manifested itself as anger, sleeplessness and blackout drinking.

“I don’t feel like I can really interact with that average, everyday person,” he said. “I get too frustrated, because A) they don’t realize what’s going on over there. And B) they don’t care.”

He’s also reluctant to tell the people in his personal life what he was doing for five years. When he told a woman he was seeing that he’d been a drone operator, and contributed to the deaths of a large number of people, she cut him off. “She looked at me like I was a monster,” he said. “And she never wanted to touch me again.”

Related stories:

Drone pilot burnout triggers call for recruiting overhaul

OpEds: Our Troops do NOT Protect Our Freedom and We Should Stop Thanking Them for Doing So

Our Troops do NOT Protect Our Freedom and We Should Stop Thanking Them for Doing So

JESSE RICHARD, TVLies.org

Recent history provides a very clear lesson for our troops and those who cheer their missions. You have never seen a more clear and egregious example of questionable motivations for military intervention than during the Bush/Cheney administration. A virtual ‘who’s who’ of defense contractors comprised not only the Defense Policy Board, but the office of Vice President. Not to mention that a significant portion of these men signed a document noting that that a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ would be useful in getting public support for their agenda (to increase military spending and activity), and then – just such an attack – the first Pearl Harbor in 60 years took place on 9/11…what a nice coincidence.

Gee, what are the odds of the only ‘Pearl Harbor’ in 60 years taking place while the men responsible for preventing one (and in positions to create/allow one) were the same men who wrote about benefiting from one. But according to most Americans, it is crazy to suspect them of anything…simply because they are Americans. If Dick Cheney had been a Muslim he would have been hanged 9 years ago.

Unfortunately, the majority of Americans have neither the intellectual curiosity to actually learn about historical events nor the intelligence to actually think about claims made by their leaders or pop-journalism-gate keeping-icons.

For example: Americans have swallowed whole the concept of our troops “protecting our freedom” without ever once asking “how, how does killing foreigners in Iraq or Afghanistan protect our freedom?” Maybe if they asked that question just once and really waited for an answer, a real answer that actually really made sense to them, they would realize there is no answer – because troops killing foreigners have no impact on the freedoms of the American people, and they never will.

Here is another question Americans have not asked, “How can an Iraqi, Pakistani, Afghan or Islamic fundamentalist in other nations take away our freedom?” The answer to this question is of course…by becoming a member of the US Congress.

It is sad that I will be lambasted for speaking the truth about this sensitive subject, but someone has to. The saddest truth however, is that the members of the US military serve today with no honor. They are dangerous and a threat to all free people, here and abroad. In plain terms – they volunteer to kill at the behest of people who have lied to them for generations about why they are being sent to kill. Generations of lies be dammed, they still follow orders, and kill, without question. I repeat – as a human being I see no honor in this.

While it is true that the existence of our military acts to deter nations from invading our shores, credit really should go more to our nuclear arsenal and military technology than to National Guardsman who find themselves shooting at Iraqis in their own homeland. I don’t think that it is a deterrent to have private American “security firms” torture, for fun, the “enemies” who are in their own country, in their own neighborhoods, near their own families, and who dare to fight the American military personnel who obliterated their homes, killed their brothers, sisters, children, mothers and fathers, and occupy their soil. The nerve of them!

In the meantime, your freedoms and protections are being systematically eliminated while government protected rights for corporations are expanding beyond your wildest dreams. If this nation had a legitimate mainstream news media you would know this and you would probably take to the streets and revolt because you would realize what some of us already know, your rights, health and wealth have been under assault while you are distracted by bogey men in foreign nations who are supposedly going to take your freedom away!!!

So how free are you and who exactly are the terrorists. Here is how free you are in your own home in your own country. These are just a few examples – off the top of my head. – there are more…but to start…

You are not allowed to drink raw milk, no matter how healthy it is, because under certain rare conditions may cause health issues), but you do have the right to smoke chemically addicting cigarettes that when used as directed WILL KILL YOU!

You don’t have the right to stop your food supply from being contaminated and genetically manipulated, leaving you with no alternative.

You don’t have the right to collect rain water or grow your own vegetables to feed your family.

You have no right to stop corporations from poisoning your air and water.

You have no right to treat your ailments naturally because your government has declared that the only way to become healthy is by medications and treatments that will produce big profits for corporations. Healthy food can not benefit your health and if it does the FDA will classify it as a drug.

You have no right to raise your child without injecting toxins and dangerous chemicals directly into their blood streams.

During the Bush/Cheney administration you had no right to free speech. Special zones called “free speech” zones were created and kept far from Bush and Cheney where those who wanted to speak as free Americans could gather.
You are not free to exchange goods and services on your own terms. You must use Federal Reserve Notes, which is NOT U.S. CURRENCY. It is a system of money created and maintained, unconstitutionally, by a cadre of private banks.

You are not free to feed homeless people and if you are homeless you are not free to be fed by your fellow citizens.

We are not free to know about or have any say about secret activities in which our rulers partake. For example what terrible weapons they create, what biological or chemical programs that may accidentally or purposely destroy us all, how they set up and instigate wars and conflict as well as events that justify actions for which they want to take but have no legitimate justifications.

America is not yet a totalitarian dictatorship, but it is clearly on the way to becoming one. And our beloved troops are doing nothing at all to stop this. What is worse is that some day they may actually be the ones to stop you from doing anything about it. They are already practicing to do so.

—Jesse Richard – Founder, TvNewsLIES.org

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Why the Viet Nam Anti-War Movement’s Work Is Not Yet Done

AlterNet / By Frank Joyce

The Viet Nam War may have ended over four decades ago, but the issues stemming from it are very much with us.

Most US citizens these days don’t consider Viet Nam at all. Of  those who do, many believe that all is well. And in some ways it  is. Viet Nam has normal diplomatic relations with the US, belongs  to the World Trade Organization, accepts investment by US based  multi-national corporations and is allied with US foreign policy on  some geopolitical issues including concerns over China’s intentions regarding “disputed” territory in the South China Sea.

On the right and the left, some believe war related issues don’t  matter much because Viet Nam has gone off the “capitalist cliff” or  isn’t conforming sufficiently to some other Western template. (The  New York Times recently featured a front-page story along these  lines.)

I disagree. I think Viet Nam war issues are still very much with  us. And if the Obama administration has its way, for all the wrong  reasons, they are going to be with us for a long time to come.

Because I have an eye out for these things, I notice news coverage  that touches on the Viet Nam war. For example, earlier this year,  Jimmy Lee Dykes, made news because he killed a school bus driver,  then kidnapped a five-year old boy on the bus and held him hostage  in his survivalist bunker. He was identified as ”a decorated Viet Nam  war veteran.”

It is not unusual to see Viet Nam vets associated with these kinds  of stories. Even more common are stories about vets of any and all  wars struggling with issues of unemployment, homelessness and  difficulties with navigating the Veterans Administration bureaucracy.

Last month there were numerous stories about a Viet Nam war  anniversary. Which one? Forty years ago, on March 29, 1973  the last US troops left Viet Nam. Many US media outlets featured  interviews with some of those veterans.

Missing from the news coverage of the 40th anniversary of the troop  return was the basis for them leaving Viet Nam in the first place.  The date certain for their homecoming was set by the Paris Peace  Accords which were officially signed on January 27, 1973.

There was not one single story in the US media about that 40th  anniversary.

In Viet Nam however, honoring the Paris Peace Accords was a big  deal. I know because I was one of several anti-war activists from  around the world invited to participate in events commemorating the  agreement.

An official ceremony in Hanoi was carried live on national TV and  the occasion was marked in numerous other ways throughout the  country. All acknowledged the contribution made by U.S. civilians  and soldiers who resisted the war. Anti-war activists at the event  were given VIP treatment.

Vietnamese leaders want young people to understand the war and  its place in Viet Nam’s past, present and future. They are well aware  that 80 percent of the population was born after the war ended.

Many young Americans were also born since the Viet Nam war  ended. A significant number are the children of parents who  supported the anti-war movement. Others have parents who fought  in Viet Nam, Cambodia or Laos.

Barack Obama and the rest of the “establishment” want to sanitize  what the US military was ordered to do in Southeast Asia and  obliterate the role of the anti-war movement in bringing the whole ugly  mess to an end.

Why they do so might seem obvious. Predator drones as a symbol of “automated warfare” notwithstanding, the US war machine still needs  plenty of humans. In addition to the wars already underway, many  others are on the drawing board. Anything that might somehow make  military service less attractive is best washed away. That certainly  includes the truth about Viet Nam.

Beyond that, every Presidential administration needs to win popular  support for permanent war as essential to preserving the “American  way of life.” You have to be pretty old to have lived during a time  when the US was not making war on one or more countries.

Since 1941, but for a few short breaks, the United States has been  making war one place or another: Korea, Viet Nam, Nicaragua, El  Salvador, Grenada, Kuwait, Iraq, Bosnia, Irag again, Afghanistan,  Pakistan, Yemen, Africa and Iran. That doesn’t even include the  current phase of the war against Cuba that started in 1959 and  continues to this day.

Whether Democrats or Republicans were in “power” has made  no difference whatsoever. It is a bipartisan condition. US war has  become so much a part of daily reality that we hardly notice. Most  Americans think it completely normal and why not? That is exactly  what it has become.

Obfuscating new “normal” is partly the job of the media. It’s no  surprise therefore that coverage of the 10th anniversary of the  invasion of Iraq did not set it in the context of our continuous military  interventions in other nations over the last 75 years.

Virtually all media stories treated the Iraq war as a self-contained  event. The reality that the machinery of perpetual war is now utterly  and completely integral to our economy, politics and culture was  thereby concealed.

If we are to disrupt the cycle of endless war however, it is vital  that we look at the forest and the trees of our present global death  machine. A good place to start goes back to when the now mature  forest was first planted.

Slavery.

The truth is that the United States is exceptional—although not in the  “we are the chosen people of God who can do no wrong” way that  many prefer to believe.

Never before in human history did a spanking new nation birth its  economy and its government on a foundation of capitalist slavery.  That is truly unique. The consequences of that “birth defect” are very  much with us today. One of them is that we are loathe to recognize  how much the consequences are with us today.

The fact of slavery required a moral justification for slavery. You  can see several such rationalizations offered in the movie Django  Unchained. And they are still going on. At the Conservative Political  Action Convention (CPAC) in March young activists proclaimed that  slave owners had been doing their slaves a favor all along.

When slavery ended, it was replaced by the Jim Crow segregation  that had long been in place in the North. That then required  the moral defense of the Jim Crow system. Today, because of  institutionalized racism African Americans are still dramatically worse  off than whites. This also requires a complex system of blaming-the-  victim mental gymnastics.

Historian Edward Braithwaite has called this “social processing”.  Centuries of rationalizing slavery (and genocide) form patterns and  paths that are part of the cultural DNA of our citizenry. Avoidance,  denial, and hypocrisy are essential ingredients.

What has evolved is a template for how to do it. One consistent  theme is that our intentions are always noble and mighty. “Their”  motives are always crass and evil. Oh and we always fight “clean.”  They always fight dirty.

So it is that our leaders not only have yet to acknowledge our  decades long 20th century brutality in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos.  Rather, the powers that be are actively working to perpetuate exactly  the opposite story.

President Obama is leading the way. Last year on May 28 in a  speech aimed at Viet Nam war veterans he said, “You were often  blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been  commended for serving your country with valor. You were sometimes  blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the  many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes  were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated.”

The president called the treatment of returning Viet Nam veterans a  national shame and a disgrace that should never have happened and  accused the Vietnamese of brutality. He also issued a proclamation  calling for “a 13-year program to honor and give thanks to a  generation of proud Americans who saw our country through one of the most challenging missions we have ever faced.”

Really? Is Obama unaware or deliberately ignoring the devastating  atrocities against the Vietnamese population ordered by those at the  highest levels of the Pentagon and the CIA? Like every American, he  would benefit greatly from reading the true history of the war in the  recently published book by Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves.

Of course, the Vietnamese know all too well the ugly reality the book  reveals, including the loss of 3 million civilians deliberately killed  by the US. The Vietnamese population also still suffers continuing  birth defects from the millions of tons of Agent Orange dumped  throughout the country as well as death and injury from unexploded US ordnance. Among our most touching experiences in Viet Nam  were visits to schools attended by children born with disabilities from  Agent Orange or disabled by encounters with unexploded ordnance.  Laos and Cambodia face the same problems.

Tragically for us and the world, too many Americans have just asm sanitized a view of the atrocities committed against Asians in Viet  Nam, Laos and Cambodia as they do of the brutalities of slavery or  the modern day prison industrial complex.

As with his Nobel Peace Prize winning colleague Henry Kissinger,  Barack Obama is committed to keeping it that way. He is counting on  the mainstream media for help. He does not expect them to report  on either the brutality and torture we inflicted as a matter of national  policy or the contribution made by those who opposed the war to bringing it to an end.

Given these lies and distortions it becomes almost inevitable that  we make the same mistakes again and again in trying to force other  nations to bend to our will and “way of life.” One bad war begets the  next.

What makes it all the worse is that we fail to connect the viciousness  we visit on other countries with the brutality that defines our own  culture. Does anyone seriously think we can control gun violence at  home when we commit massive violence every day in countries all  over the world? Or that “PTSD” homicides, suicides and domestic violence are not “blowback” from foreign aggression?

Should we be surprised that we elevate a distorted view of the  second amendment, which was used for purposes of slave  control, among other things, to a preeminent position in the U.S.  constitution? Or that we are routinely urged to live in a constant  state of fear despite having the most massive “defense” spending in  the history of the world, police with military grade firepower and the  largest number of “criminals” locked up of any nation on the planet?

There is, fortunately, another side to this story. The history and  traditions of our nation also include an abolitionist movement. Whites  died in the struggle to end Jim Crow segregation in the South. A  broad cross section of the population vigorously opposed the U.S.  wars against Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. Some died in that struggle as well. And the anti-war movement did make a difference  in bringing the war to an end more quickly than would otherwise have  been the case.

These struggles are anything but finished. Regarding Viet Nam,  Laos and Cambodia in particular, Obama and Hagel have made  clear they intend that their version of history will prevail.  We will pay a heavy price if they succeed. So apparently we will  have to have this argument all over again.

Fortunately, we have powerful resources on our side now just as  we did during the fight against the war. Embers of War by Fredrik  Logevall just won the Pulitzer Prize for History. His book details US  efforts to prevent independence for the Vietnam as early as 1919.  Fred Branfman recently wrote an excellent piece here on AlterNet setting the record straight on the many war crimes instigated and  advanced by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Viet Nam  Laos and Cambodia.

The voices of ordinary citizens are eloquent and essential too. David  Ledesma recently put it beautifully in a letter to the editor of the  Mercury News in San Jose, California:

Then as now, the peacemakers are the true heroes. The sooner we  more widely understand what was done in Viet Nam in our name,  the sooner we will make real headway at dealing with injustice and  violence here at home and stop waging immoral and stupid wars  abroad.

Frank Joyce is a life long activist and author. He can heard on Dave Marsh’s radio program “Live from the Land of Hopes and Dreams,” on SiriusXM channel 127 from 1-4 Pm Eastern time.