Sic Semper Tyrannis

The Snowden Ruckus By Richard Sale

A u.s. Senator warned that “NSA’s potential to violate the privacy of American citizens is unmatched by any other U.S. intelligence agency.”

“Tons of electronic surveillance equipment at this moment are interconnected within our domestic and international common carrier telecommunications systems. Much more is under contract for installation. Perhaps this equipment is humming away in a semi quiescent state wherein at present no citizen is targeted but simply scanned…How soon will it be before a punched card will quietly be dropped to the machine, a card having your telephone number, my telephone number or the number of one my friends to whom we will be speaking.”

The sinister statement above was uttered in 1976.

Under the Reagan administration, the NSA could be authorized to lend its full cryptanalytic support – analysts as well as computers – to any department agency. By then, the microwaves and the internet and satellite coverage had transformed human communication. By 1981 there were domestic satellites in orbit with the capacity of carrying thousands of circuits.  Each COMSAT bird had 18,000 thousand circuits that record many thousand phone conversations. Literally tons of billions of words including computer data transfers. Even the mail was being carried by satellite.

"A Note on Kohl" by Richard Sale

A Note on Kohl

By Richard Sale

The observations of the ConfusedPonderer on Jim Baker and Helmut Kohl were absolutely first-rate. They are full of insight, and I agree with him that the most praise must go to Kohl for accomplishing German reunification. He was initially cautious about the topic, suggesting five-year program that would end in a single state. 

In 1989, Francois Mitterand, the French PM, said of reunification, “I don’t have to do anything to stop it; the Soviets will do it for me.” But Mitterand was wrong as was Margaret Thatcher.  The Soviets were completely open to financial persuasion.  Gorbachev tried to hold the negotiations hostage by asking for a ransom of $20 billion.  In the end, he settled for $8 billion, with another $2 billion in interest-free credits. From 1990 to 1994, Bonn transferred to Moscow the equivalent of $71 billion with another $36 billion going to the former Communist states of Eastern Europe.

"Close Combat" by Richard Sale, Part 2

Memorial Day Memoir: Sgt. George Artis Boomer

Close Combat (2)

By Richard Sale

 My wife and I came back from Georgetown late one night. It was after one, it was a sweltering, humid July evening without a breath of air. The project crowd had left their sweltering, airless homes and had spilled out into the streets. It was clear a lot of people there had been drinking.  Crowds breed fear, but as I scanned this one, my eyes suddenly spotted Skinny Pimp, the gang leader. Sgt. Boomer and his buddy, Harry, had once been attacked in their house in Southwest D.C. by a gang.  The gang was trying to get in the front, when Harry and Boomer threw smoke bombs out the front door, then, carrying their M-16s, they came out the back. The gang fled.

 The sight of Skinny Pimp put me into a grim, furious, implacable rage.  Yes, I had been at a party and had been drinking, but the insult of the little stone rolling by me on the pavement still irked me, and if I wanted to confront Skinny Pimp and the time was now. 

I first took steps to get rid of any anger. Anger is the breeding ground of mistakes. Up in my apartment, I put on jeans and a jean jacket. I had a small, short club which I put into the belt of the jeans in case Pimp had a knife. I had no mouthpiece.  I kissed my Iranian wife goodbye and went out. Some of the party goers saw me coming and were curious.  When I get truly infuriated, I get calm, and my lips go white. I was later told that my lips were white. I was six two and so was Pimp. He was lean, wiry, wore cool clothes, black leather jackets, boots, the dark shades, etc.  I told him in front of his own people that he had terrorized the little girl, our baby sitter, and I told him I was doing to send him to the hospital.  It was not rhetoric. I was going to break his left ribs, rip his nose from his face, or break his collar bones. There was a tactic that I had trained for in which you sunk both stiff fingers into the hollows around the collar bones and simply sank your weight and yanked them out. I certainly was going to pivot and drive an elbow into his face. My mind was rapidly turning over tactics.

"Close Combat" by Richard Sale, Part 1

A  Memorial Day Memory: Sgt. Boomer

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars

I was prevented from going to Vietnam because of a bullet wound, but by 1971, the wound had healed. In those days, Washington, D.C. was a tough town, full of unrest, drug deals and gangs. I was trained in hand-to-hand combat by a “tunnel rat,” a U.S. Army Sgt. whose jobs was to enter North Vietnamese tunnels, plant charges, and then quickly back out in order to keep from being blown up by the charges he had planted. My instructor was one of those men; he was black, in his thirties, a handsome, sensitive man who had a grip like pair of pliers. His name was Sgt. George Artis Boomer. Once he had killed a man in a North Vietnamese tunnel, using his knife in the dark.  (His stories were confirmed by the men he had fought with - I talked with many of them.)

His domestic life was turbulent. One time, his wife in Washington, D.C, had tried to stab him, and when she failed, she fled up the stairs and was found sitting on the bed with her baby in her lap.  Boomer had gotten an M-16 and was thinking of firing through the floor at his wife when he went up and saw the baby. (Fifteen years later, they were still married.)

Boomer was a hand-to-hand combat instructor for the 18^th Airborne Corps, and he had been a special hand-to-hand combat instructor for the 82^nd Airborne. In Vietnam, he was almost been killed in a fight with a Vietcong prisoner. The Vietcong was part of a group of prisoners being held by the American Army. The prisoners were bound with their hands behind their back, and they were sitting on the ground. They were guarded by American troops. An Army lieutenant came by, and told Boomer to release this one man.  Boomer objected.  “Sir, that man is very dangerous,” he said. The lieutenant was arrogant as he was ignorant. Free the man, he said.  Boomer did.  No sooner had he done so, than the Viet Cong, with his hands now untied, had sprung to his feet and hit Boomer hard in his chest with a reverse punch to Boomer’s solar plexus. The Vietcong then hit Boomer with a sharp, hard side kick to his lower leg and punched Boomer again in the chest and throat.  Boomer fell over backwards. The Vietcong, now convinced he was certain of victory, stepped over Boomer’s prostrate body with his left leg, positioning himself to drop his right knee, with using his body weight to land on Boomer’s face, a blow which would have killed Boomer. But the Vietcong had left his right hand hanging down, just before the knee drop, and Boomer seized that hand, pulled it with his own left, and with his right hand, reached up and took out the Viet Cong’s throat in a single movement.  Boomer said that when the man screamed, it sounded like a something screaming under water.

New Sale Story on TA

Richard Sale has posted a new Story on the Athenaeum.  pl 

 

Communism - As A Viable Principle Richard Sale

 

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Sale

Critics, fighting WWII - A Reply by Richard Sale

I see that my offhand comments about World War II got all the dogs barking.  There is a good book by Liddell Hart, the author of Strategy who also did a book, The Other Side of the Hill in which Field Marshall von Rundstedt states that he was surprised that the US didn’t invade France in 1943, not 1944, after Germany had occupied the rest of France in 1943. “I thought you would take advantage of this extensive stretching of our resources,” he said. Can anyone imagine what that invasion would have done to the future of Eastern Europe, if the invasion had been tried a year earlier? Chester Wilmont did a whole book expressing his intense disappointment that the invasion wasn’t tried earlier. At least that is my best recollection of it. Time always matters in war, especially in a war when the future of the continent was going to be decided by the movement of armies. Sale 

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The Necessity of Fighting World War II - Sale

"I was astonished to find out recently that the population of Auschwitz in 1944 was 80 percent gentiles. Of course, as I stared at the page, the horror gradually dawned me – that by then almost all of the Jews from Europe had been gassed, leaving only the gentiles.

You cannot overstate the horror what the Jews suffered. Most of the Jews carted off by the Nazis were highly educated: they were lawyers, doctors, teachers, technicians, scholars who were used to a high degree of civilization, schooled in courtesy, politeness, tolerance, generosity, and earnest and sincere in giving of sympathy to those who most needed it."  Sale

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Shortsighted Wars - Sale

"When we decide to use force to intervene, it is usually after we get emotionally roused, have a sense of being terribly affronted or experience a sudden explosion mass inflammability that forces irresistibly into war. In these cases, we intervene not on the basis of cautious, prudent or carefully measured deliberation and we avoid carefully thinking out what we plan to achieve. As an example, we entered an imperialist war against Spain based on our outrage over having an American warship in Cuba bombed, an allegation that later proved not to be true. We invaded the Philippines, and then waged war on their inhabitants who, at the time of our arrival, were looking forward to their freedom from foreign occupiers. Instead, we became one."  Sale

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A Note on Foreign Policy - Richard Sale

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More guns of August - Richard Sale

"A reader responded to my first ramble on Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August by saying, with a sense of defiant assertion, that the book is a masterpiece of the first class. But I wholeheartedly agree. It is historical writing of the first order. Please remember that what occasioned my remarks was a reader who said the book rendered a first class account of the crisis of 1914, and that is the one thing the book does not do, masterpiece that it is. In any case, what it lacks is a power of historical analysis."  Sale

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The Guns of August - Richard Sale

"A reader mentioned that The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman as the best account of the miscalculations that led to the war, but I’m afraid that I cannot agree. Tuchman is a superb writer of history. One has only to think of The Proud Tower, her masterpiece, I think. She displays an expert mastery of color, background, setting, and excels in the vivid depiction of personalities. In addition, she is able to pace and drive a carefully framed narrative of events. She brings history to the complicated pitch of life that it once was lived. But the Guns has serious faults. In some ways a genuine masterpiece, the book utterly scants the diplomacy that led to the war. Perhaps the most detailed study is the diplomacy is L. Alberinti’s Origins of the War of 1914 in three volumes which makes excellent use of all kinds of documents. (It’s very expensive to get.)"  Sale

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Miscalculations - Richard Sale

"The situation in North Korea should give us great pause.  It should make us pause and think about the role of Miscalculation in the Use of Brute Force in history. It is very clear that most wars are caused by a series of what seem to be trivial miscalculations that bring about horrible results.

The brilliant historian, Max Hastings, sent me an e-mail recently telling me he was working hard on a book about World War I.  Given his capacity for insight, for accuracy and capacity for meticulous research, I believe he will produce another masterpiece."  Richard Sale

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"Today is Friday" - Ernest Hemingway

"He looked pretty good up there today."  pl

Today is Friday

 

"Strike The Tent" trilogy by W. Patrick Lang

    

To Order Directly From the Author:

Rosemont Books

PO Box 16103

Washington, DC  20041 

Pricing for Perfect bound Softcover: 

The Butcher's Cleaver:  $23.95 (Hardcover $33.95)

Death Piled Hard:  $18.95   (Hardcover $28.95)

Down the Sky:  $15.95  (Hardcover $25.95) 

Please add $3.99 S&H handling for each book ordered, or $11.89 for all three books in the Trilogy.

----------------------------------------

Also Available from:

 iUniverse

 
http://bookstore.iuniverse.com/AdvancedSearch/Default.aspx?SearchTerm=W.+Patrick+Lang

E-Book version of all three available at iUniverse

Barnes and Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/W--Patrick-Lang?keyword=W.+Patrick+Lang&store=allproducts&iehack=%E2%98%A0

Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Butchers-Cleaver-Confederate-Secret-Services/dp/0595474764/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358700423&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Butcher%27s+Cleaver

I was interviewed some time ago by the North Carolina Museum of History concerning the writing of this trilogy.

http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/collateral/Podcasts/Confederate%20Secret%20Service.mp3

This podcast is highly recommended

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"Science currently holds that time travel is an impossibility, but readers of Down the Sky, the final volume of Colonel Pat Lang’s Strike the Tent trilogy will question that assertion. Code-named “Hannibal,” Confederate penetration agent Claude Devereux is firmly lodged in the upper echelons of the Federal war machine. Now a Brigadier General of the Union forces with the new Congressional Medal of Honor on his chest, Major Devereux of the Confederate Secret Service knows time is running out. His minders in Richmond may no longer trust him, his personal life is a shambles, and Union spy-catcher Lafayette Baker is determined to bring him down. Only his peculiar, personal friendship with President Lincoln holds his enemies at bay.

Casualties by Richard Sale

"He lay there, vague, dazed, head swimming, his ears deafened with an odd ring, and as he lay there he tried to remember. What had happened? What? He asked this over and over, but no answer came. Nothing. Then, all of a sudden, he could recall the force that had hit him like a bus, hitting him so hard that his body had been borne up free of the ground, hurtling to the rear where he’d come down with a bone-jarring crash. "  Sale 

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Literary Criticism by Richard Sale

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2012/12/download-the-music-of-words.html

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"Reply to killers by Richard Sale

"My goal in writing what I did was to direct attention to the kind of personality that allows one human being to murder another in cold blood -- the defects in emotional make-up, the dearth of imagination, and the inability to insert yourself with compassion into another’s situation. My comments were aimed at people who harbor pet opinions in spite of the fact that those may lack any intelligible logic; people were are so intent on having their narrow positions triumph, they vehemently disdain the ideas they have in common with others; people who have their own pet hobby horses that they are addicted to riding at all costs; people who have such an exaggerated sense of their own value, that they would trample the world beneath their feet in order to gain their own ends. "  Richard Sale

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"Killers of Children" by Richard Sale

 

"A murder is always the work of a violent, irritable self-will working in perverse directions from the bulk of ordinary, hard working, persevering human beings. A killing embodies the principle of hostility. It has its roots a disease of self-exultation that ridicules efforts and the stature of ordinary humans and disdains their welfare. Killers have had no sound notion of anything. They look down on all others because of their fictitious merits which leads them to believe that they are superior to anyone else on Earth. Killers have no honest or reliable way of measuring values. The ones I knew had crude, coarse, repulsive personalities that looked at ordinary people with no aerial perspective. By narrowing their views and shrinking their capacity for sympathy, killers build a structure in which their figure towers above everybody else. They have no common humanity. Besides them, there is nothing. They are diseased dwarfs that think themselves as mighty and as invulnerable as Everest." continue reading this piece by  Richard Sale

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"Outdated Rubbish" by Richard Sale

 
 

"Leaders painted themselves in heroic colors claiming that their wealth was due to their skill, diligence, insight, forethought, perseverance, guts, cunning etc. The result was a romantically tinged picture of what was merely unbridled ruthlessness, and what was not seen or discussed was the fact that they were at heart rough, shrewd, skilled opportunists whose methods were devious, unstable, brutal, corrupt, mean, nasty, rapacious, gross, vulgar and totally unprincipled men who had simply battened on the blood of the American system to suck it out. But they were successful, and so “success became the visible evidence of spiritual merit,” as Schlesinger said. Individuals who made good deserved the gratitude and applause of all mankind. This verges on the disgusting." Sale

 

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"Reading Henry James" by Richard Sale

"My wife, who is an ambitious reader, recently set out to read Henry James two-volume work, The Portrait of a Lady. Feeling she should enjoy some solidarity, I began to read it as well. I have read it three times, but long ago, and I truly believe that you never read the same book since all of evolve mentally all the time. Things which were mediocre at the beginning become startling vivid over time. So I set out." Richard Sale  

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"Attention" By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars

When you are a small child, most of what you see will be found to be indistinct, a bewildering multitude of details that are odd, unusual and featureless. William James once said that for a baby all is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” The small mind will come to rest only when it finds an interest that allows it to linger. When a child finds an object, a sight, a movement, and object, or even a color, to be interesting, the whole scene comes alive. It is interest that fuels the child’s ability to develop a strong power of attention. Having an interest is a mental affection the child feels for something outside of itself. It is the alliance between attention and interest that impels a child to return again and again to an idea or a sensation, in order to gain further insight and power over what has made it curious. The child’s mind then starts creating meanings and a clearer experience out of chaos.

People sink out of sight in the pedestrian details of their lives. They are captives of repeated falsehoods or distractions that sabotage any settled sense of purpose. An interest secures attention, but to sustain any interest we have to visit it as much as we can. To develop an interest takes time, and an interest has its enemies in restless child’s mind that tempt it away from its task of focusing. The depth of an interest testifies to its genuineness in the child.

Indignation as Policy - Richard Sale

In the year 1850, John Parker Hale, free soil Democrat from New Hampshire who had been watching the painful aftermath of the failure of the 1848 revolutions, began a speech to express his sympathy for “the millions who are under the heel of power.” Taking the tone of today’s human rights crusaders, he said he viewed the crushing of the revolution in Hungary by Russia and Austria as a moral, not simply a political, question. He urged “…the American Senate, the highest legislative body of the world, the wisest, greatest and most magnanimous people” to “constitute themselves a high court” whose mission should be “to try the nations of the earth for ‘atrocious acts of despotism.’” Hale urged that we Americans as “a high court of indignation. “are to arraign at our high bar the nations of the earth, and they are to pass in trial before us.” America’s targets weren’t to be small fry or second rate powers, but villains like the Czar of the Russia,” the aim to try him “not only for what he did to Hungary,” but “for what he had done long ago in sending those unfortunate exiles to Siberian snows.” Hale then asked, “And after we arraign Russia, what would the next target be? England for the way they had treated the Irish and for the cruelties oppressions they did there?” (or) “go to Algiers to inquire what the French had done there?” Hale wanted to try the czar of Russia, In other words, Hale felt that the U.S. government should become a unilateral agency for the promotion of human rights.

"Operation Bonehead' By Richard Sale

Author of Clinton’s Secret Wars

The Aspen Security Forum meets every summer and features notable foreign policy officials such as Admiral William McRaven, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the U.S. military’s cyber war efforts. During a discussion last week, participants were floored when Stephen Cambone, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s undersecretary of defense for intelligence, described the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003 as, “one of the great strategic decisions of the first half of the 21st century, if … not the greatest.” He said the results of the decision resulted in “the aftershocks that you see flowing through the region, whether it be in Libya, or in Egypt, or now in Syria.” All the region’s latest developments “can be traced to it,” he said. As a piece of effrontery, this has perhaps few equals. Think about it for a minute. Imagine luring your country into a war based on false premises, on dubious and contaminated information to remove an Arab leader and destroy his nuclear weapons that were allegedly threatening the peace of the world.

A Ramble on Egypt

By Richard T. Sale, author of Traitors.

Islam is on the march in the Middle East.  For the past few years, in every
Mideast election, the Islamic parties have won: in the Gaza Strip in 2006, in Iraq
and Tunisia in 2010. In 2011, they won again in Turkey and Morocco, and in
Egypt the Islamist parties confirmed an overwhelming victory in the first
parliamentary elections since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt represents the new reality. In February 2011, its youth, liberals, and leftists at last gave voice to theirlong-suppressed outrage over the economic and social injustice of Mubarak’s regime. Within a few weeks, a senior U.S. official passed the word to Egypt’s military that Mubarak had to step down. “It is time for him to go,” the U.S.
official said, and Mubarak did, ending a thirty-year rule.

This was a hardly a revolution, however. It was a revolt, with a dictator being removed, but leaving in place the old military structure that continued to run the country. To the leftists, the youth, and the liberals, who had fully expected that their democratic idealism would own the future of the country, the recent Islamic victory left them stunned and dismayed. Like many in the U.S. media, they were the prisoner of
words like, “democracy,” “liberty,” “the future,” and “the needs of the
individual,” phrases that have been used by so many countries in so many parts
of the world and in so many different ways, that they have become weak,
hackneyed, and dangerously vague. 

An Israeli-Iran War: What Would It Look Like by Richard Sale

By Richard T. Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars

For months, there have been rumors of a strike by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The propaganda build-up is very similar to that directed against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 2002. In both cases, an isolated state with limited military and physical resources is depicted as a horror threatens to end the survival of the world, except, of course, that Saddam Hussein's WMD didn’t exist.

According to several U.S. analysts like Steven Heydeman, a perceptive commentator for Foreign Affairs, the message emanating from Israel and its right-wing U.S. supporters, is that the road to Jerusalem and an Arab-Israeli peace leads through Iran. Prime Minister Benhamin Netanyahu contends that since Iran’s support of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza means permanent hostiity to Israel's existence,the only way to make  an Israeli-Palestinian peace possible is to use brute force to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability.  As a result, Iran is incessantly depicted by Israel’s right-wing as the seat of all the world’s evil and calls during the last few weeks for a joint U.S.-Israel strike against Iran have reached a crescendo of frantic anxiety.

Israel’s rationale for a strike is solidly rooted in its past.  Avner Cohen, a first rate analyst of Israel’s nuclear and defense programs, wrote recently that the day after the bombing of the Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in June 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin exclaimed that the Osirak attack meant installing a new strategic doctrine that said that “Israel would do its utmost, including risking starting a war, in order to prevent hostile states in the region from obtaining nuclear arms.” Behind this statement lurked Begin’s fear of new Holocaust of Israel’s Jews.

Israel adopted the so called Osirak doctrine, as if “it were holy writ,” said Cohen. But what the Israeli public in 1981 did not know was that throughout the operation, Begin hadn’t correctly understood his own intelligence, plus top Israeli security officials - including the heads of army intelligence, the Mossad and the director general of the atomic energy commission – had stridently opposed the attack. The obdurate Begin launched it anyway.

"Israel’s battle plan" by Richard Sale

In the event of war with Iran, Israel is going to deploy a vast array of high tech weapons that would “take out” Iran’s air defense systems by rendering them deaf, dumb and blind, and then inserting and activating a new version of the Stuxnet virus to destroy its command centers, said serving and former U.S. intelligence officials.

Israel’s battle plan also calls for the destruction of all of Tehran’s communication and network surveillance including its electrical plants, radar sites and command centers, said officials who requested anonymity because of their close proximity to ongoing investigations.

The Republican Candidates: We Came, We Saw, We Lied by Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author Clinton’s Secret Wars and Traitors 

The GOP candidates are all working hard to carry a system of negative qualities to complete perfection. They labor diligently to exclude from their minds any ideas or feelings they have in common with others. Have ever in your life heard so many lame-brained inanities, so many staggering misconceptions, so many clichés, so many antique attitudes, and so many grotesque and obsolete positions offered as genuine policy? Have you ever seen such a vast of expanse of historical ignorance incessantly masquerading as knowledge? Their opinions have nothing to do with the merit of a case, but are put forward only as a promotion of the narrow agenda of their party. It’s a disgrace enough to be stupid but to take pride in being stupid and praise it to the unwary as virtue, demands a special gift, and the Republicans truly have it.

Think of their record. (They never do). But in foreign policy, for example, they are always on the wrong side of History.  Never mind Palin and her inability to explain why we have two Koreas, all we have to do is remember how the GOP, through Hoover, was urging “peace with dictators” in 1929, ignoring FDR’s description Hitler “as an enemy of the human race.” Or think of today’s candidates urging that Iran be obliterated and its innocent people slaughtered, ignoring the fact that Iran's citizens are not any more evil than Israel’s. Or think of them as urging an invasion of Syria and the creation of democracy there, ignoring the fact that their party invaded Iraq under completely false pretenses and made it unstable.  Or think of how they are praising the liberation of Libya, ignoring the fact that that country is a now torturing, mutilating and murdering its rivals even as those factions are busy partitioning it. In other words, just ignore the facts, and instead, embrace dogma.

"Israel’s Assassins and Tehran’s Killers (courtesy of Truthout)" by Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, former UPI Intelligence Correspondent

 

They are dying one by one. 

They are Iran’s nuclear scientists, and they are being murdered.  Since 2007, five Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in Iranian territory, many victims dying from magnetic bombs that terrorists had attached to the exterior of their cars.

The latest attack took place on January 11, 2012, when Mostafa Ahamdi Roshan, Deputy Director in the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, died without warning in a blast in Tehran shortly after two assailants on a motorcycle, placed a bomb on his car. 

According to news reports, confirmed by Truthout, the United States denied that it was to blame for the killing of the 32-old Roshan after Tehran said Washington and Israel were responsible for the attack. “I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters when asked about Iranian allegations over the attack. 

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor added, “The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this. We strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like this.” 

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of not being identified, said that President Barack Obama reacted angrily to the latest killing because since his election he had tried to prevent any acceleration in the covert U.S.-Israeli war directed at Iranian nuclear facilities. 

The Israeli program, which has been in place for almost a decade, involves not only targeted killings of key Iranian assets but also disrupting and sabotaging the Iran nuclear technology by infecting Iran’s enrichment computers with a U.S.-Israel virus that heavily damaged them and by sabotaging Iran’s purchasing network abroad, these sources said. 

U.S. opposition to the program initially intensified as President Obama made overtures aimed at thawing decades-old tension between the two countries. Part of his strategy was driven by America’s desire to use Iran’s roads into Afghanistan to help resupply U.S.-NATO forces there. 

But in spite of Obama’s desire to relax tensions, Israel continues to carry out killings using its proxies, including an armed group of Iranian dissidents, a group that has high level political backers in the United States despite being a terrorist organization. 

Former senior CIA officials said that Israeli terrorists were members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) who are paid by Israel to do targeted killings of Iranian nationals. 

The Republican Debates by Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars and Traitors. 

The great poet Paul Valery once said that politics is the art of getting people to argue, fight and torture each other over something that they know or care about.

What astonishes me always in political debates is the irresistible urge for completely undiscerning people to comment and argue about things they know nothing about. These so-called “public questions,” are the very things that most people (whether Republican or Democrat) are completely indifferent to. Indeed, politics would not be possible except for the indifference of the majority.  Unfortunately, it is always a small, venomous, energetic minority who given a computer or a microphone the sight of a camera, are instantly at the throat of anyone who disagrees with them.

At the heart of every human being is a streak of merciless egotism. Each of us has it in some degree or another. Most of use our manners and good conduct try to hold that egotism in check; we even to try and train it to give way to the needs of others.  Unfortunately in politics, there is no such delicacy. In politics that self-consuming egotism results in the tendency to sneer, insult, libel, slander, to be wildly inaccurate. In politics, is given free rein. Its crimes against others are done in good conscience because they are done in the service of noble ends, a higher collective human good

 

The Pathetic Israel-Iran Rivalry by Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars 

Richard Hofstadter was a great American historian but was also a master of polemic.  One of his best is The Paranoid Style of American Politics. 

His depictions are telling.  He notes that the “The paranoid spokesman, sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes. 

He goes on to say: “In the politics of paranoia, the enemy “ is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed, he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often, the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing)he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional)” 

Hofstadter then goes on: “Psychological projection is essential to the paranoid style of politics. It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is, on many counts, the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations, set up to combat secret organizations, give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Clan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist crusader” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.” 

Why is all so drearily familiar?

"How There Came to be a North Star" by Richard Sale

 by Richard T. Sale for Carol, Christmas Eve 1987

Download How There Came to be a North Star by Richard T Sale

 

 

Who Are the Arabs? by Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars 

I probably should have dealt with this question first.

Who or what are the Arabs?

Adherence to Islam is the criterion for any attempt at a definition.  There were many Christian and other minority sects in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine or Egypt. Millions of Muslims live in lands as remote as Indonesia or the Philippines or, nearer by in Turkey and Iran. Muslim countries used to fall themselves Arab.  Not the Egyptians. They saw themselves as Africans, the descendants of the Pharoah and, in their eyes, different from and superior to the Arabs of the desert.

But according to Middle East experts I’ve talked to, Arabs appear to be descended, without inter-marriage, from the people who lived in the Arabian Peninsula, the Bedouins who moved to place and now reside in what are called Arab countries. They were Semites. But there were also other Semites who had also been Bedouins called Hebrews, the descendants of Shem, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.  Did these groups of Semites have a right to nationhood because of the commonality of religion or origin or culture? Rabbi Khedouri had cautioned his people that the Sephardic Jews of the Middle East and Africa have nothing more than religion in common with the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe and the rest of the Diaspora where language and culture differ vastly from their coreligionists who had been born in South Asia.

In any case, it seems to be that Israel has to be judged as a sovereign state and not on grounds of religion.

But the common ancestry of the Arab and the Jews underlines the moral that no quarrel is more bitter than a family quarrel.

But I know very little about these things. I have the Rabbis book somewhere, but Pat should take care to modify my stupidities.

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IMO the "Arabs" of the countries conquered by the early Muslims are "Arab" by language and preference.  Many of the inhabitants are genetically the descendants of all the diferent peoples who have lived in these places.  pl

An Invented People? by Richard Sale

Year	Jews	Christians	Muslims	Total1
First half 1st century CE	Majority	-	-	~2,500²
5th century	Minority	Majority	-	>1st century
End 12th century	Minority	Minority	Majority	>225
14th cent. before Black Death	Minority	Minority	Majority	225
14th cent. after Black Death	Minority	Minority	Majority	150
1533–1539	5	6	145	157
1690–1691	2	11	219	232
1800	7	22	246	275
1890	43	57	432	532
1914	94	70	525	689
1922	84	71	589	752
1931	175	89	760	1,033
1947	630	143	1,181	1,970      pl from wiki cited below

^1. Figures in thousands.

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By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars 

My son once asked me about a remark by a comedian who asserted that the Palestinians were never a people, and I replied to him, “That’s an AIPAC argument. I used to see it in the writings of reflexive American far-right Israeli supporters except even the hard right in Israel (some of whom I talk to) no longer disputes that the Palestinians are and were a people. Were they a people united by language, race and a common culture like the Jews? No said AIPAC. But for seven hundred years the Arabs or Palestinians made up the majority of the population of what was called Palestine before Israel became a state in 1947 -- (that’s when the U.N. vote was taken at the U.N. in Flushing Meadow New York to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews.) 

 The Palestinians were a village people who lived in settlements ranging from a few dozen people to a thousand. They placed their villages near springs and sited them on ground that had defensive features so that they could be safe from the marauding raids of the Bedouin tribes who were always wandering in off the desert and helping themselves to what belonged to other people. There was always a low-level of warfare between the Palestinian villagers and the Bedouin tribes. 

“Iran’s First Great Satan was England.” - Richard Sale

From Richard Sale, 

Stephen Kinzer did an article for the New York Times a week ago entitled, “Iran’s First Great Satan was England.”

Most of Kinzer’s article dealt with Iran’s battle over the Anglo-Iranian Oil Concession (AIOC), and used dialogue from exchanges between President Truman’s special envoy to Iran. W. Averill Harriman and the then Prime Minster Mohammad Mossadegh. Kinzer doesn’t ever identify the source of these lively  exchanges, but they cone the memoirs of CIA asset Vernon Walters, Silent Missions.

I wanted to expand a bit on Kinzer. There were a couple of critical events that would prove to be the source of deadly enmity between Iran and England and the first of these, to my mind, was the Anglo-Russian invasion of Iran in August of 1941. This occurred at 4:34 am on the 24th and without any ultimatum or any declaration of war. Then Iranian ruler., Reza Shah, sent President Franklin Roosevelt a telegram that concluded, “I can no longer see for what reason these acts aggression and for bombing without reason our cities.”

(I later journeyed to London to talk to Reza Shah’s son in law, Gen Jam, who had written the telegram because Reza Shah’s English was extremely poor. Jam also had priceless anecdotes about Reza Shah’s exile in Mauritius.)

"What Israel's War Against Iran Would Look Like" Sale

"According to several respected US analysts on the Middle East, such as Vince Cannistraro, former CIA head of counterterrorism, and Judith Yaphe of National Defense University, the message emanating from Israel and its right-wing US supporters is that the road to Jerusalem and an Arab-Israeli peace leads through Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contends that since Iran's support of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon means permanent hostility to Israel's existence, the only way to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is to use brute force to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear capability. Israel's right wing incessantly depicts a nuclear Iran as the seat of the world's evil, and calls during the last few weeks for a joint US-Israel strike against Iran have reached a crescendo of frantic anxiety."  Sale

http://www.truth-out.org/what-israels-war-against-iran-would-look/1323374542

Wars and Rumors of Wars by Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars 

I just received the following this morning from a former senior US intelligence source. 

US officials are concerned that Israel is close to reaching an Iranian attack decision but a senior Defense Department official is worried that The Israelis may not warn the Americans before taking military action against Iran's nuclear facilities. US officials thought they would receive warning from Israel if it did take military action against Iran, which is the belief of the political side of the Obama Administration, but some military think that assurance is now not the case. In his recent visit to Israel, American Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta did not get a clear commitment from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak that Israel would not take action against Iranian nuclear facilities without coordinating any such operation with the United States.

Richard sale post on TA

See this new post on literature and the young.  Here is the link for those who cannot find the "Athenaeum" button to the right.

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2011/09/to-a-young-reader-.html

  pl

Monopoly By Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars   

 
  

There are people who have only one idea, and they never talk of anything else. The person of one idea is like a child with a string. The child can toy with it  crumple it up, twist it, make it into strange shapes and even stamp on it in frustration, but it will remain the same, dreary old string. You may be bubbling over with a sense of events or your impressions of life but your attempt to introduce, discuss, or dilate about your enthusiasms will not get a fair hearing  To a person of one idea, your concerns are nothing but a rude intrusion, an upstart interruption, of their own fascinated absorption in their one idea. 

   We have all had some experience with a person of one idea.  “Save the Whales,” or “Free South Africa,” or “Abortion,” or “Women’s Rights,” “Gay Pride,” or “The Middle East Peace Process” – there are any number of examples of those who became captive of a single issue. We also know that the person comfortably enounced in a single idea has the advocate’s temperament, and everything they think provides a pretext for their recital of that one, singular interest. Advocates are, above all things, debaters.  They are single-track embodiment of will. They don’t really talk, but rather, like Luther, put up a thesis.  Any diversion from that and, like a restive animal, they will sniff and stomp until they return to what really matters. 

The Middle East Peace Process 

   The history of the Middle East Peace Process appears to closely resemble in its working the Myth of Sisyphus.  Each day in the Middle East, earnest, honest, clear-headed people straggle horribly to push, heft, lift or drag the enormous stone up to the summit only to find it in their laps the next morning. The disputing parties of the Arabs and Israelis, the Arabs and the Jews, appear to lack any sound knowledge of the other’s institutions, traditions, history, and their sacred principles.  They appear to forget that, in every dispute, there as to be a system of conciliation. Fair-dealing and straight-talking has to occur or there will be no durable progress. Things cannot be one-sided or any movement will freeze like ice. 

   Historically, the cause of the dispute began in 1948 when Israel’s victory established Israel as a sovereign state. This resulted in the expulsions of many Palestinians from their Muslim homes. The loss of Muslim sacred lands rubbed the Palestinians where they were very raw, but for Israel, the heart of the dispute was centered, not on 1948, but on the war of 1967, Israel’s third war, when a victorious Israel acquired and occupied the West Bank of Jordan along with East Jerusalem and other territories. The final status of the West Bank became the chief issue and remains so today. 

   There was a tiny inkling of a solution back then. In 1967, Israeli legal officials took the view that Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank had been illegal.Yet they maintained that it was not illegal for Israel to settle its citizens there, and there was a further refinement. Israeli legal experts said that although Israel’s settlements were allowed in the West Bank, the claims of Jordan to the ownership of the land were valid.  Then, after more discussion, Israeli legal specialists then went further, saying that settling by Israel of the occupied land was a violation of internal law, especially the Fourth Geneva Convention. Of course, over time, the occupation still stood, with Israel and America pretending that Israel had defined the borders of the West Bank when in fact nothing like that had occurred. 

   As the years passed, the respect for standards of negotiating that were impartial, permanent and universal, were swept away as both sides quarreled about the national character, traditions, and cultural requirements of each other, while underneath it all lay the unspoken conviction of both that the other was lacking in virtue.  

A Reply to Sidney Smith on Holbrooke’s Death by Richard Sale

    
(After Richard Holbrooke’s death in December, Sidney Smith, a man whose intelligence I very much admire, protested about my comparing Tolstoy with Flannery O’Conner.  Somehow, the post was mislaid, so I am forwarding it now). 

     Sidney Smith’s comments about my posts are always courteous thoughtful and extremely well-expressed, and I would not offend him for anything. Yet in his conviction that I had tendered a slight to Flannery O’Connor by comparing her to Tolstoy, I believe he was not only “off topic” as he concedes, he was, in my view, off the point as well.  

     I think it was Bagehot who once classified readers as voracious, subtle, stupid or otherwise.

“Wars of Religion:” A Reply to a Critic

Richard Sale author of Clinton’s Secret Wars   

     Certain qualities of mind are irksome. When we encounter a writer and hear the careless approximation of a complicated array of facts, and the speaker portrays it as the product of considered thought and persevering application when it is only empty and glib -- that is irksome. When an interpretation of intricate events is put forward on the pretense of being authoritative when it only embodies inadequate hearsay or defects of knowledge -- that too is irksome. But when certain smug, sweeping prouncements are made with a presiding, complacent air, aimed at self-display that clearly  show a disdain of solid knowledge --  that is not only irksome, it is deeply nettling.  

     Recently I did a posting about the Arab-Israeli dispute.  It likened it to Wars of Religion.  In response, the reader quickly contradicted my thesis:

      “I'm afraid I do not agree with Mr. Sale that religious wars exist. Wars are about power. Religion is merely the excuse.”  My critic follows:  “As for the bestiality, Sir Isaiah Berlin paraphrased Bakunin: ‘Religion allows people to commit unspeakable cruelties against other people, then sleep well at night, safe in the knowledge they are doing the Lords work.’”

Wars of Religion By Richard Sale, author Clinton’s Secret Wars

     Today in the Middle East you have two groups of people, the Arabs and the Israelis, reared up to confront one another in animosity and suspicion, both in the grip of fear, with the zealots of each having nothing but eyes for the atrocities, the wickedness and beastliness of the other. In public both portray the other as threats to world peace. Can both be right?

     We have seen this phenomenon before: Russia versus the West, capitalism versus communism, the western love of democracy versus arbitrary dictatorship, the developed world versus the Third World. But the clearest analogous situation to the Arab-Israeli dispute is the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeen century.

The Return of Hell - Richard Sale

 
   

The world is full of killing.  As I write this, one thousand people die violent deaths every day in wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, the Mexican drug war, Sudanese nomadic conflicts, the South Yemen insurgency.

    But the reasons for the arrest of former Serbian leader Ratko Mladic last week were different from the killing described above.  The massacres ordered by the Serb leader were not the result of one hostile force being pitted against another in a struggle of endurance and wills. Instead, the campaigns of the Serb were the deliberate actions of a national group that had taken upon itself the extinction of its rival neighbors. Such a group moves with industrialized precision, and acts with no pity, no imagination, no soul, and no regret. One immediately thinks of Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews or his wholesale murder of Soviet soldiers and prisoners.

Nonsense & the Civil War

 
By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars 

          A serious, conscious mind today resembles a person sitting under a waterfall, squatting compactly with drowned hair, eyes tightly shut, mouth gasping and spitting while all around the foul water furiously boils. 

          Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, et al., pose very real dangers to mental health, and with the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, one fears that we are once again to be subjected to yet another deluge of toxic sludge.

A Cautionary Note on Egypt - Richard Sale

 
By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars.

The current TV and news coverage in America ignores the fact that the Egyptian mind is very unlike our own. I believe that today we should be thinking not of similarities between ourselves and the Egyptians but of the dissimilarities. We must not be like the American who initially sees in an Englishman a glorious and welcome replica, an almost perfect copy, only later to come to quarrel over the differences that emerge. The best course would be the opposite – to see the Englishman first as a foreigner and only later come to appreciate the things that the two of you share in common. Some  erk in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, recently said with a gush:  “We are all Egyptians now!” That is false and repulsive. It insults the Egyptians. 

Crisis and Death ( Hariri Part 3.) Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars 

The crisis between the U.S. intelligence services and Hariri began with the 9/11 attacks.  As one serving U.S. analysts said at the time, with the discovery of the hijackers’ Saudi identity, The Kingdom ordered Hariri and the rest of their agents into a “protective stance” in an effort to repair “Its shattered image” in Washington. The agency was shocked to find that their key asset was no longer talking to his American controllers and even when he did, he never gave anything of value regarding secret Arab conversations, sources said. The case was made worse when the agency thought of the huge monies they had spent on furthering their man’s political career in Lebanon.  Former CIA official Larry Johnson said at the time, ‘”It’s another example of the incompetence of the agency in managing a source.” (Johnson, a good friend, was not a source for this piece by the way.) 

A former senior U.S. intelligence official agreed with Johnson: “It doesn’t take much to fool the CIA if you are averse to risk and you give your superiors the idea that you have this great source who makes you look good in your fitness reports.”

Bashir and Hariri - Richard Sale parts 1 & 2

Bashir and Hairiri  (Part One) 

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars 

The history of our foreign policy in the Middle East are so  ugly and twisted and so stolid and remorselessly ruthless that reviewing them is a real glimpise into genuine moral squalor.  

Lebanon is an excellent example. U.S. policy there in 1982 was under the influence of the truculent hawk, Ariel Sharon. Israel was then supplying covert support to the main Christian group in Beirut, the right-wing Phalangist party, headed by Bashir Gemayel who had the face of a baby and the mind of wolverine. Sharon came to America asking that the Reagan people put up another $ 1- million to support Bashir.  The Reagan people were deeply in thrall to Israeli views and, like Israel, they saw Lebanon as a “regional influence,” and like Casey thought that the PLO was the major threat to Israel and were delighted that Bashir also loathed the PLO. 

Little ducks in a row. 

Bakhtiar: a reminiscence - Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars 

(I agree with Pat’s excellent posting on the eruptions in Tunis and Egypt. Islam is not only a regliion, it is a social order and its ways are not our ways. Inside every Tunisian or Egyptian there is NOT a liberal democrat trying to get out.

But Pat’s mention of Bakthair made me remeber the following.) 

In the summer of 1980, I was in Paris for National Public Radio. Khomeini was in power in Iran, and a war between Iraq and Iran was gathering force. Paris, in other words,  was a Balkan city at the time of World War I, seething with spies, in such abundance they were tripping over themselves. . Especially prevalent were the CIA guys and their proxies (exiles from Iran), busy  exchanging intelligence, estimates, assessments –  sizing things up.

Syria attempted Hariri cover-up - Richard Sale

As the U.N. yesterday completed its probe of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, not yet releasing the results, former senior and serving U.S. intelligence officials again insisted that the killing was done by Syria or Syrian proxies.

The Feb. 14 blast killed 16 and wounded 100, according to UPI news accounts.

The murder galvanized opposition elements in Lebanon which immediately demanded that Syria withdraw its forces.

But U.S. intelligence officials also accuse Syria of attempting to engineer a cover-up of the blast.  The Syrians prepared a cover story in advance, one serving U.S. intelligence official said.

World War II - Richard Sale

The War with Japan

    It should be remembered that while the popular view is that Japan‘s government prior to 1941 was a formidable totalitarian monolith, in fact, it was anything but. Japan’s civil government ended in 1931 and what remained was a clamorous, quarrelsome amalgamation of cliques and factions, the latter ridden with additional subgroups, the most radical of which was the Japanese Army. Supposedly abjectly subservient to the Emperor, in fact these groups disobeyed the Emperor when they didn’t ignore him.

     The different cliques were so bloodthirsty, indocile and unruly, that the result was basically government by assassination. Army groups who disliked policies murdered prime ministers as casually as tearing up a ticket, with no compunction at all.