WKOG OP-ED: THE NIHILISTS

Wrong Kind of Green Op-Ed

December 23, 2015

by Jay Taber

Illustration remixed from an original image by andres.thor under Creative Commons License – Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

In part of his taped March 24, 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Armitage noted that getting arms to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan was not so difficult: “It was making sure that we wouldn’t be, one, embarrassed by what they were. And no matter the charismatic nature of Ahmed Shah Massoud – and he was quite charismatic – that doesn’t make up for raping, drug dealing, et cetera, which many of the Northern Alliance had been involved with. So it’s not easy.”

As Deputy Secretary of State, Armitage was responsible for outing undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband Ambassador Wilson’s refusal to go along with the fraudulent Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) campaign promoted at the UN by Secretary Powell.

One of the myths deposed by the 2010 Wikileaks U.S. State Department embassy cable cache is the notion of diplomacy as a benign exercise, above the fray of dirty dealing that takes place at the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. With the revelation of spying on UN officials — authorized by Secretary of State Clinton — the continuity of malpractice under the previous White House by Secretary Powell, with help from his long-time associate at the Department of Defense, Richard Armitage, proceeded seamlessly under the Obama administration.

As documented by Jerry Sanders in his book Peddlers of Crisis, Cold War hawks in Washington made their bones by producing and disseminating misperceptions about the Russian threat, that in turn justified the inordinate military buildup by the US and NATO. In essence, says Sanders, the national security military industrial complex, while perhaps warranted at some level, was nevertheless a colossal fraud concocted by Washington insiders at Langley and the Pentagon.

Deliberately falsified information and wildly exaggerated threats were, in fact, not only used to enable looting of the U.S. Treasury to meet these false threats, but also to promote some notorious characters into the halls of power. People like Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, and Richard Armitage.

Today, through agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, lessons in psychological warfare learned by Cold War hawks and private sector friends like George Soros are still being applied in the interest of US hegemony, albeit in more creative ways. As noted in this 2011 article about NED-funded political opposition groups in Russia, the exaggerations, while containing an element of truth, are leveraged to perpetuate popular myths that can be capitalized on by US interests.

Further Reading

9/11 As Sequel to Iran-Contra: Armitage, Carlucci and Friends

Amnesty’s Shilling for US Wars

Wag the Dog: Campaigns of Purpose

Welcome to the Brave New World — Brought to You by Avaaz

[Jay Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, a correspondent to Forum for Global Exchange, and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal. Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and activists engaged in defending democracy. As a consultant, he has assisted indigenous peoples in the European Court of Human Rights and at the United Nations. Email: tbarj [at] yahoo.com Website: www.jaytaber.com]