The Benghazi Circus: Is There Anything There?

Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi! (to the tune of "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia"). Meme floating around Facebook.

Question: Why has there never been a coup d'etat in Washington, D.C.?
Answer: Because there is no U.S. embassy there.

Not a new joke, but appropriate in the light of this week's congressional hearings into the "terrorist" attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last September 11. Republicans are up in arms, trying to implicate President Obama and now former Secretary of State and presumed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in something resembling a scandal. Increasingly shrill, Republican politicians and conservative pundits are claiming that there's something here worse than Watergate, the actual scandal back in the early 1970s that revealed illegal activities in President Nixon's reelection campaign.

It's obvious the primary Republican motivation is "gotcha," a continuation of their base, and often deeply racist, campaign against the country's first black president. We're all used to seeing how when Obama says "yea," they say "nay." It's a tiresome spectacle, especially because Obama's underlying positions are often much closer to those of the Republicans than anyone cares to acknowledge. But it seems to me clear that the Obama administration is indeed engaged in a fairly clumsy attempt to muddy the waters over the Benghazi incident. There's some leaked e-mails showing an attempt to get the administration talking points just so, and an effort to explain the odd spectacle of Obama's sleazy U.N. diplomat Susan Rice being shuttled around the talk show circuit to soft-peddle what was, from their perspective, a minor diplomatic disaster.

Of course there's the standard Republican hypocrisy. One need only recall the unheeded message "Osama Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S." from a presidential briefing in August 2001, that George W. Bush was never seriously held responsible for; or the hundreds of large and small attacks on American diplomatic properties that have taken place in the last couple decades. And there's little discussion of Republicans cutting back on the budget for diplomatic protection. So in one sense, scandal, schmandal. This is a routine Washington sideshow. These are all sleazebag politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, looking not for truth but looking to make — or cover up — hay.

But I think it's a fair question to ask why the Obama administration stuck to a trivially unimportant talking point, that the Benghazi consulate was spontaneously attacked during a protest against a crude anti-Islamic American film rather than attacked as part of a planned action by enemies of the United States.

Iranian revolutionaries display captured evidence of CIA spying at the occupied US embassy in Tehran

Question: What do you call the destruction and burning of a U.S. embassy?
Answer: A good start.

I think two things happened in Benghazi that the administration would not care to admit. First, that post-NATO regime change Libya was full of people not so apparently grateful for U.S. intervention; and secondly that the so-called U.S. Benghazi Consulate was something more than just a diplomatic installation. Indeed it seems that one of the objectives of the Benghazi attackers was to liberate prisoners who were being held at the consulate. The question must be asked: Was the Benghazi Consulate actually a CIA black site?

As the exposure of the nest of spies in Tehran back in 1979 by heroic Iranian students revealed, so-called American diplomatic installations are actually and commonly hotbeds of espionage and subversion. For decades and decades all over the world, U.S. embassies were hosts to coup plotters and schemers to manipulate foreign governments to the will and interests of the United States. In the post-911 era of the so-called war on terror, it would surprise noone to learn that the web of CIA black sites — off-the-public-grid facilities where suspected "terrorists" could be held, interrogated, tortured, or worse, often with the assistance of local repressive secret police agencies — would include American facilities in hotspot countries like Libya. There's already a public record of the CIA working with repressive governments, ironically including Libya's Gaddafi who it eventually helped overthrow, and Syria's Assad, to interrogate suspected terrorists. It would seem to me shocking and counter-intuitive to think the Benghazi consulate was NOT such a blood-soaked station of international repression.

The new Libyan government was embarrassed by the attack on Benghazi (the state-department socialists of the North Star blog, big supporters of the NATO intervention, even ran an embarrasing apologia for the attack.) With the establishment of a U.S. drone base in neighboring Niger, one suspects that spying eyes will be quick to foil any future "terrorist" attack against U.S. interests in Libya.

The real lesson of Benghazi is that U.S. imperialism has a proven record of covert and open manipulation of foreign governments. As far as I'm concerned, the destruction of the consulate there was another case of chickens coming home to roost. To me the real outrage is that other U.S. diplomatic facilities elsewhere all over the world are engaged at this very minute in acts of subversion, control and exploitation. That's what imperialism does, and that's not a truth one should expect to come out of the congressional Benghazi circus.

Perhaps there's some perverse pleasure to be taken in watching corrupt, war-mongering politicians in Washington bloody each other: I for one have no interest in choosing between creepy racist Republicans and Hillary Clinton/Susan Rice/Barack Obama. But ultimately scandals like this one are ugly spectacles that demoralize and depoliticize people. One day we'll put all those buildings in Washington, built by forced labor of black slaves, to good use.

Hands (and Drones) Off Assata Shakur!

Crossposted from Kasama. Since I wrote this last night, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has already reported that a giant "wanted" billboard has gone up in Newark, New Jersey. What an obscenity! Assata has been living peacefully in Cuba for THIRTY YEARS. What does it mean that she has now been labeled a "terrorist"?

Today the Obama administration's FBI added black liberation fighter Assata Shakur to its list of "Most Wanted Terrorists." They doubled the million-dollar price on her head; and she becomes the first woman on the list. Fortunately Assata Shakur is living free in Cuba after being liberated from a federal penitentiary in 1979, but it's clear her life is in mortal danger. Labeling Shakur a "terrorist" is a declaration of war against all dissenters and revolutionaries, and sets her up for murder at the hands of the state with complete impunity. It's also evidence of the continued bullying relationship between the United States and its anti-imperialist Caribbean neighbor, Cuba.

If Assata Shakur can be labelled a terrorist, so can anyone who has raised their fist against the empire.

Assata Shakur is a survivor of the vicious COINTELPRO campaign that attempted to smash the Black Panther Party and its offshoots in the 1960s and 1970s. Dozens of heroic black liberation fighters were murdered outright or sent away to prison for long sentences: the U.S. government was determined at any cost to smash a movement that refused to play by liberal rules. She was repeatedly framed with apolitical crimes she had nothing to do with; she went underground but was arrested in 1973 when the car she was a passenger in was attacked by New Jersey State police; and was very seriously wounded while trying to surrender.Democracy Now quotes a letter Shakur wrote to the Pope on the occasion of his visit to Cuba in 1998:

"At this point, I think that it is important to make one thing very clear. I have advocated and still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the U.S. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty."

But what Shakur is not guilty of is terrorism. Indicted ten times by the government for supposed crimes ranging from bank robbery to murder and kidnapping, Shakur's only conviction was her final one, by an all-white jury, stacked with family members of cops, who ignored the copious medical evidence that showed she was shot while she had her hands held up high. This accusation of "terrorism" reflects the new reality of U.S. imperialism under Bush and Obama: with drone technology it's a license to kill.
In Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, we closed each of our General Assemblies by linking hands and reciting Assata's words from her 1973 statement, "To My People":
"It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains."
Assata is our hero. We must be vigilant, and protect her and the freedom-fighter legacy she represents.
Check out Common's "Song for Assata" on youtube:


HANDS AND DRONES OFF ASSATA SHAKUR!

Happy May Day, 2013!

In honor of May Day, known as International Workers Day, here are the words of Jiang Qing, last wife of Mao Zedong, at her trial as a member of the "gang of four" in 1980: "Making revolution is no crime! It's right to rebel!"

This is appropriate for us in the U.S.A. where, in full Orwellian fashion, even though this country is the birthplace of May Day via the Haymarket martyrs, it's referred to as "Law Day," or even more grotesquely, "Loyalty Day."

Fuck loyalty. Fuck the law. Celebrate revolution!

In the words of two great revolutionaries, "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." - Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Anti-Americana: The Glorious Spring Victory

April 30 is the anniversary of the victory of the combined forces of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the People's Army of Vietnam over the United States and its Republic of Vietnam puppets in 1975, as tanks bearing NLF flags crashed the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon. This beautiful Vietnamese poster gets to the heart of the matter: vastly outgunned, a determined people defeated the most powerful military on earth and ended a conflict that had cost millions of lives. Human resilience won over military might. We do well to remember that conflict.

The Meaning of Boston: A Fragile and Threadbare Society Revealed

I've tried to contextualize the events of the past week in Boston as elsewhere. I've put this up first on Kasama threads, crossposting it here.

As everyone knows now, the entire Boston metro area was locked down Friday so law enforcement authorities could pursue a manhunt against suspected terror bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev, a young U.S. citizen of Chechen ethnicity. The streets of the Boston suburb of Watertown saw parades of black-uniformed paramilitary SWaT teams and armored military vehicles parked at intersections. In unprecedented fashion, mass transit was shut down, businesses were closed, even travel in the northeast corridor was halted.

Just five days before, Tsarnaev, with his brother Tamerlan — killed in a shootout with cops on Thursday night — allegedly dropped off two pressure-cooker bombs filled with BBs and nails at the finish line of the Boston marathon. When the bombs exploded, they killed three people — including an 8-year-old boy who had previously been photographed protesting the racist murder of Trayvon Martin — and maimed dozens more. Witnesses described limbs ripped from bodies flying through the air. While the days between the bombing and Tsarnaev's capture witnessed an orgy of clueless and racist media speculation, false leads and accusations, racial profiling, and even a handful of violent incidents against random, innocent “Muslim-looking” people, there's reasonably strong evidence against the Tsarnaev brothers. The evidence, combined with the circumstances of their final confrontations with police suggest the veracity of police claims against them. As of this writing, the motives of the Tsarnaevs remain unknown to anyone but themselves. Of course all sorts of further details are yet to be exposed, including some alleged history of contact between the elder Tsarnaev brother and an FBI antiterrorism task force.

Repression Laid Bare
8-year-old Marathon bombing victim Richard MartinIf the events in Boston revealed the incompetence of the capitalist media, they also revealed a massive apparatus of state repression. Authorities were able to sift through thousands and thousands of surveillance photos, taped phone conversations, and a massive crowd-sourced information gathering and snitching operation to identify the Tarnaevs before they moved in on them...

Read the whole article

Anti-Americana: We'll Sink Your Battleship

2013 stamp and postcard from the DPRK

Fresh off the presses in February of this year, this new stamp and postcard from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (that's North Korea in popular parlance) honoring the vigilance of the DPRK military. Just in time for this year's Spring sabre-rattling, it shows a hypothetical artillery blow against an attacking American battleship. Designed in glorious North Korean agitprop posterese, this bright and colorful design is part of a series of four, though the only one to visually note whom the Korean military is defending itself against.

Speaking of sabre-rattling, this year's episode is marked by unprecedented amounts of bullshit from the US government and its media parrots. Every news report in the American media is full of talk of "threats" from North Korea. I'm amazed that the US can send high-tech bombers to actually practice dropping bombs over North Korea right in neighboring South Korea, and the North Korean response is called a "threat" with a straight face. I call that self-defense.

The repulsive neoliberal New York Times has even run an OpEd piece called "Bomb North Korea, Before It's Too Late," which calls for going ahead and starting a way. Never mind the genocide. Never mind the previous time, 60 years ago, when the USA literally flattened every city in North Korea and still couldn't defeat the North. What the heck, what's another 3 million lives lost?

Counterpunch recently ran an interview with some unnamed North Koreans. It should be required reading for all the Americans buying into the narrative of North Korea as some kind of crazed renegade bully. (As if a tiny poor country could bully the largest military power on earth). Here's a few choice extracts, quotations from DPRK citizens:

"The DPRK negotiated with the U.S., but the U.S. broke agreements, and increased sanctions five times. When the DPRK would agree to some terms, the U.S. would raise the ante. The U.S. had said we cannot have nuclear power, because we could use it for bombs. We cannot have satellites because the missiles we send them into space with can be used as military missiles. These they these things can have dual purpose, one civilian, one military.  They deny us food because they say it can be used to feed the military. If we kept going along with this, they would say we cannot have kitchen knives because we could use them for fighting.
There are slave states and noble states. Noble states develop their own technological infrastructure, GPS, weather reporting, etc., so need satellites. These days satellites are used for many things. If your country doesn’t have your own technology, you end up a slave state, dependent on other countries.  Noble countries are in control of their own development and have a future.
Maybe without nuclear weapons we could already have been attacked by the US in a war. Now our people can live more peacefully. The people of the DPRK are proud we have nuclear weapons, they are a guarantee of peace.  Only we on our own can safeguard the peace.
The US has over 1000 nuclear weapons in South Korea – nuclear artillery, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombs, nuclear landmines.
The DPRK has called for a nuclear free Korean peninsula, but this call has been ignored. Now that we saw no choice but to develop nuclear weapons to defend ourselves, we are sanctioned. This is a double standard insulting to our people."

Once again, the issue is not whether or not the government of the DPRK is more or less repressive than our own; the issue is whether North Korea has the right to stand up, as a sovereign nation, to provocation from the U.S. To me, the answer is clear, and an unqualified yes. 

Defend North Korea against imperialist attack!
 

Ding dong . . . the “witch” is dead?

Margaret Thatcher died today, and celebration is the order of the day. She was a monster: a partner in crime of Augusto Pinochet and Ronald Reagan; she joined Reagan in calling Nelson Mandela a "terrorist." This is setting aside all the horrible things she did to working people in the U.K. Amid the celebration, I did notice something, and this article by Bay Area revolutionaries Advance the Struggle really caught my eye, so I'm reblogging it here. While I'm still working out my opinion on the works of Marxist-Feminist Sylvia Federici (author of Caliban and the Witch), I know quite a bit about witches and this article gets it exactly right. —ISH

Witch Side Are You On?

I dont intend to attack anyone for their word choice, but would like to raise a little bit of consciousness on this word choice of calling Thatcher a “witch” as a form of insult.
 
Margaret thatcher was the opposite of a witch. By referring to thatcher as a witch, one denigrates the real witches of the late middle ages (and other women whose independence was

slandered by patriarchy as witchcraft) whose genocide (witch hunts) was intimately bound up with the subjugation of the new proletariat and colonizing missions.

The witch hunts culminated in a triumph for the bourgeoisie, in the form of a division of labor at the heart of which was a stark divide between productive labor and reproductive (domestic) labor. Workers outside of the home (predominantly men, but women too) were waged slaves whose productivity was under-valued through the fetishism of commodities (money hiding the unequal exchange of equivalents). Workers inside the home (exclusively women) were not paid at all, the most extreme fetish (illusion) this new capitalist order would produce. At the heart of this illusion that women’s domestic/reproductive work did not merit a wage, was the false belief that women are genetically prone to do this work for free as loving mothers and loyal wives. Male wage earners were given a position, imposed on them and enforced by law, of domestic overseer with all the tools of coercion they might need, from the right to rape to the right to beat “their” wives who regarded as dependents on the man. Thus the male proletariat was coopted by the bourgeoisie in a scheme to keep the total wage bill of that class half of what it should have been. In this sense, all of us male proletarians have a duty to honor our sisters as pillars of the class at every available opportunity. Part of that is learning the history of women as workers inside and outside the home. That history includes the heroic chapter of witches’ resistance to capitalism at the very dawn of its existence. [the book Caliban and the Witch is a good place to start]

Margaret thatcher was a traitor to her gender. Witches were the most loyal members not only of their gender but also of a far reaching pan-european anti-capitalist/anti-patriarchy movement from the 1300s-1700s, that is, during the period of capitalism’s maturation as a world system.

Death to Thatcherism!
Long live women’s liberation and proletarian revolution!

Iraq: Ten Years Ago the Massacre Began

I have featured this photo, by the late photojournalist Chris Hondros, before on this blog. It is the quintessential image of the Iraq war, which marks its shameful tenth anniversary today.

That's not her blood.

It's the blood of her parents, with whom she had been riding as they drove through nighttime Baghdad. The American soldiers claimed they had ordered the car to stop, as though they had that right in the first place, and the parents failed to do so. So they opened up their automatic weapons.

The child survived, the parents did not. This child survived a horror of light and sound and screams and splashing blood. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be that child. I wish I could not imagine what it was like to live in the country that did that to her. But I do.

Ten years ago the U.S. attacked the sovereign state of Iraq unprovoked, having spent the ten years previous trying to starve the country into submission through blockade. The blood of hundreds of thousands, like this little girl's parents, is on the hands of every rightwinger and neocon who promoted, lied, and cheated to make that war happen. It's also on the hands of every cruise missile liberal who enabled them. Hillary Clinton and the New York Times are as guilty as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and George W. Bush. I'm not holding my breath waiting for well-deserved war crimes trials.

Some people are trying very hard to forget what they did.

I doubt this girl will ever forget it, and neither will I.

Report on East Flatbush

Memorial for Kimani Gray in East Flatbush. Photo by me.

I've written up a report of last week's events in East Flatbush in the aftermath of the police murder of Kimani "KiKi" Gray.

"Last Saturday night Kimani was in the neighborhood hanging out with friends. At 16, he was learning to navigate some tough turf. There's not an African-American kid his age in Brooklyn who doesn't understand the way things are: staying in school seems pointless, finding work will be hard, being pushed around or thrown up against a wall by cops is the price of leaving your house, and sticking with your friends or even a gang is the way to keep it together.

That night two plainclothes cops decided Kimani looked suspicious. They claim he pulled a gun on them from his waistband as they approached him. Two menacing strangers walking toward a kid who was just out on the street with his friends...."

Read the whole report at Kasama. 

 

Brooklyn: Justice for KiKi!

Been spending some time this week in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, supporting the community organizing against the brutal police murder of young Kimani "KiKi" Gray, shot seven times by the NYPD including three times in the back, last weekend.

I helped produce this flyer for Fire Next Time network: it was created in a small palm-sized version to pass out at the neighborhood vigils which have frequently morphed into rebellious confrontations with the legion of cops occupying the neighborhood. I'll be writing a longer piece on the week's events soon.

WHEN NOT EVEN CHILDREN ARE SAFE,
IT’S TIME TO FIGHT BACK!

This week the people of Brooklyn reclaimed their streets. We should be proud of all the sisters and brothers who rebelled against the NYPD lockdown of our neighborhood. But this is just the beginning. The cops have always and will always continue to brutalize and murder our people. What are we going to do next?
 
The NYPD rolls with crews from all over NYC. We need to roll with all the brothers and sisters from Bed-Stuy, Brownsville, Jackson Heights, Harlem, and the Bronx. The NYPD has unity. We need unity in order to stop this bullshit once and for all: to make revolution possible.
 
We must win all the poor and working people of New York City. They are on our side. We must stop the war inside our communities and instead focus on our real enemies: The NYPD and all those who protect a state that oppresses the black, brown and poor people of this country. Until justice has been served, peace is not an option.
And to Jumaane Williams and all other politicians who claim to represent our communities: Don’t blame us for our anger! The cops are the outside agitators!
 
JUSTICE FOR KIKI! POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
UNITE THE BLOCKS!
FREE THE STREETS!