Uzbek Murders 8 Bicyclists in New York City: Will Trump Now Ban Everyone From Uzbekistan from Entering the U.S.?

According to the logic of his various travel bans, surely he must, to "keep America safe!"

An Uzbek rented a pickup truck and used it to careen down a bicycle path in Manhattan, mowing down bicyclists, 8 of whom died. After about a mile of mayhem, he crashed into a school bus, whereupon a cop shot him and he was taken to hospital, where he is under guard. This vicious asshole lived in Paterson, New Jersey, and decided he needed to kill some people in New York. He will go unnamed by me as he is not worthy of that recognition. There's a good chance some or all of his victims opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, or Israeli oppression of Palestinians, two of the Islamofascists' grievances.

In addition to the deaths, there were a dozen injuries. Five of the dead were Argentine visitors, one was German or Belgian, depending on the media report, and two were Americans. So the ISIS-manqué did a mediocre job of killing Americans. The attacker has a wife and two young children, whose well-being is apparently of little or no concern to him, since he has effectively abandoned them and they will be objects of opprobrium if not worse, and without a breadwinner for the family. He also must be indifference to the crap his Muslim neighbors will now endure.

The politicians and police have branded the attack terrorism, because he presumably had a "political" motive. (The use of a vehicle to commit homicide is one of ISIS' suggested ways to harm people in its exhortations to launch attacks, and was used previously in Germany, France, and Britain. A note in Arabic in the truck hailed ISIS, proclaiming obviously falsely that it would live "forever. Nothing in the universe does that. The killer was an Uber driver with 1,400 trips under his belt. Uber has swung into action and banned him from now on. Good idea.) [1]

Whatever fear is generated by this "terrorism" is being generated by the incessant media drum-beating on it, with the same scant details reiterated over and over, and politicians stirring the pot with exaggerated, doleful statements. One of the worst is the Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has been positively maudlin. To hear him tell it, every New Yorker has just courageously endured an unspeakable ordeal yet remains unbowed and unbroken. (I'm not exaggerating, that is how he's talking.) In terms of the scale of tragedy, this is the same as a bad traffic accident! (And the Uzbek sure had a fearsome arsenal: a paint gun, a pellet gun, and some knives. Terrifying! Luckily a "hero" cop shot the guy. A cop so "humble," related the police commissioner, that he feels he was just doing his job! Amazing!)

As for what Trump should do, if he follows his own "logic,"  just banning all Uzbeks from entering the U.S. won't be "tough" enough. This man is a permanent legal resident and entered the U.S. in March of 2010. So to be truly "safe," the U.S. must DEPORT all Uzbeks.

However, a Muslim from any country could become a "terrorist." Shouldn't all Muslims be banned? After all, "we don't know who these people are!" as Our President has repeatedly pointed out.

But the U.S. loves religion, so it doesn't want to "discriminate" against Muslims. Nor are U.S. Federal judges showing an inclination to disregard U.S. anti-religious-discrimination law. So it needs to ban all people from countries where there are Muslims. That would be most nations on earth.

But I'm sure Trump, being a reasonable and sensible man, will instead call for some weak half-measure. Actually he'll probably just use this to argue for the necessity of his latest ban, which is irrelevant to this incident (he's never banned people from Uzbekistan entering the U.S., and as I said, the bicycle-butcher has been here since 2010) just as most of the gun control proposals are irrelevant after each headline-grabbing mass shooting. (Most shootings involve "legitimate" gun purchasers using legally-obtained weapons, so more background checks or background checks on gun show purchases or banning whatever are irrelevant. Banning buttstocks that increase the rate of fire, and large capacity ammo magazines, would probably lower the number of casualties in mass shootings, but would not eliminate them. But the U.S. Congress won't even do that, and the two-thirds of U.S. states controlled by the GOP have been removing restrictions on carrying guns in public, even allowing them on college campuses.)

Trump took absolutely no action and called for no new laws or regulations whatsoever after the recent Las Vegas gun massacre that killed 58 people at a concert and wounds and injuries to about 500. So far, in the aftermath of the NYC attack on bicyclists, he's responded by ordering intensification of scrutiny of foreign visitors under his "extreme vetting" regime. I suppose now it's "super-extreme vetting," "vetting like you've never seen before, believe me." Totally irrelevant to this case, as the perpetrator was a legal resident of the U.S. since 2010. He's also calling for an end to the particular visa program under which the Uzbek got his green card to live in t he U.S. In other words, punish thousands of completely innocent people. That's a good response, Trump.

As a measure of how irrelevant this is, ISIS hasn't even claimed responsibility for the attack! Apparently they find it disappointing. ISIS is quick to take credit for any mayhem it plausibly can, whether it was their operation or not.
 
The local media are reporting that the culprit is "bragging" and "unrepentant" and "unapologetic" from his hospital bed. They were expecting an apology?

One thing this shows, which no media notes because it conflicts with their desire for threat inflation (which is also a prime motivation of politicians and secret policemen) is this shows how WEAK ISIS is. ISIS DID NOT mount this attack. It did not infiltrate operatives into the U.S. It has no sleeper cells in the U.S. (I'm sure with ISIS being squeezed out of its territorial conquests, it would have activated them if it did.) It did not even train this jackass. He's being described as a "lone wolf" attacker by people like New York State Governor Andrew "Son of Maximum Unction" Cuomo. What kind of powerful organization is that? [On the afternoon of Nov. 1, a day after the attack, news broke that the FBI was interested in a second man in the attack. Also the attacker was identified in a previous terrorism investigation but wasn't the "subject" of that investigation. I wonder if they planted tiny cameras in his home, like they do to non-violent dissidents.]

As for the Attack Of The Uzbek, the FBI has seized charge of the New York investigation. The BBC announced that the FBI will be reaching out to other agencies, including abroad, to learn about this man's movements and contacts. BBC, the British government's global propaganda arm, said for sure this would be a multi-agency investigation. They forgot to mention the most important sources of data about people and their connections: the NSA and  its junior partners in the "Five Eye" countries, which includes GCHQ in the UK. The FBI has free access to the NSA's stupendous database of the world's Internet, telephonic, wire, and other traffic, including records from license plate readers and surveillance cameras. Using facial recognition software, they can search for places the man has been in the past.

The FBI will search the government's database of airline travel (they know everywhere you've flown- they have that automatically, oh, and all your financial and medical records too) and arrest records in the U.S. and abroad. Cooperating foreign police and secret police agencies will cough up whatever is in their files on the man. (Unless it would reflect badly on them. Like if he was once an informer, or worse, for one of them.) By 11 AM the next day the New York City Police (NYPD) informed the press at a "news conference" that they knew the killer exited the George Washington Bridge at 2:43 PM when their license plate capture system recorded his vehicle, and a surveillance camera outside the Holland Tunnel recorded the beginning of the attack.

Does living in an omniscient police state stop "terrorism"? Does it make people safer? It certainly doesn't make victims of state political persecution safer. Already the BBC's Uzbek correspondent has reported that the secret police there are expected to use this opportunity to increase the already severe repression in that nation.

The "terrorists" give the secret police of every nation just what they want: an excuse to tighten their chokehold on the lives of the citizens. In Kenya, the regime of the "democratic" dictator Uhuru Kenyatta, who just got himself "reelected" "president" unopposed, runs death squads under the tutelage of the U.S., Britain, and Israel, that murder hundreds of people a year. This is known as "counter-terrorism." Watch the excellent Al-Jazeera documentary exposing this ongoing campaign of extreme criminality by four states, which has been totally blacked out by the establishment media of the culprit countries. Which means those media are accomplices to state terrorism and murder and by rights should be held criminally culpable.  [2]  

Al-Jazeera is run by the government of Qatar, which is currently under blockade by Saudi Arabia, its Persian Gulf lackeys, Egypt, with the U.S. piling on. The main demands of the Saudi -led assault on Qatar, publicly endorsed by Donald "Pussy-Grabber" Trump, are three: adopt the same hostile posture towards iran as these states have; stop "supporting terrorism"- no explanation of what they're referring to; and shut down Al-Jazeera.

Al-Jazeera isn't hated by only the Saudis. Al-Jazeera has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. since 2001, for reporting things the U.S. doesn't want reported. The U.S. has responded with verbal attacks, branding it "terrorist propaganda," and with physical attacks, bombing Al-Jazeera offices at least four times, kidnapping its staff, one of whom was imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay torture center for years, where the U.S. tried to force him to agree to be a U.S. spy inside Al-Jazeera, and launching cyberattacks on it. Tony Blair, the loathsome, self-righteous, oleaginous former British prime minister who conspired with Bush the Younger in the invasion of Iraq, had to talk Bush out of bombing Al-Jazeera's main headquaters inside Qatar! Where the U.S. has military bases! Talk about being drunk on power. I guess Bush found a substitute for alcohol and cocaine.

So no surprise that the Saudis are demanding Al-Jazeera be killed. It reports real news from all over the Arab and Muslim worlds, much of which the totalitarian, hyper-repressive Saudi regime finds threatening. (Just about anything human is threatening to them.)

 Oh, by the way, Kenya is "an ally in the fight against terrorism." That is to say, it invaded Somalia to help out the U.S., which prompted Al-Shabab, the Somali Islamofascist organization, to counterattack inside Kenya, against "soft targets" like the shopping mall and university attacks. Notice the pathological symbiosis between Islamofascist fanatics and state terrorists. Each creates the conditions for the perpetuation of the other. Repression breeds resistance, which leads people with no other options except surrender and acceptance of random state murders and other forms of oppression, or joining up with the only armed opposition available to them, the Islamofascists. The continued existence of armed terrorist groups gives the regimes excuses to increase political repression and murder pesky dissidents and political opponents, along with "potential" or "likely" or "identified" "terrorists." That latter category, in the case of Kenya, is supplied by U.S. and UK "intelligence," and those named are duly "eliminated" by one of several Kenyan government death squads.

As Dick Cheney said, "we have to go to the dark side," or in the words of CIA goons like Cofer Black, they've "taken the gloves off." Which is to say, governments are flat-out murdering people they don't like. In Kenya, this has happened in cases after the government has taken people to court, where they were acquitted. On such thin "evidence" the government then proceeds to murder the victims, because in their minds, suspicion is certainty. Not suspicion of actual crimes either, but of possible future crimes.

Now, there's nothing to stop the Kenyan government from setting up internment camps for people with "radical views." Those are the so-called "terrorists" that Western "intelligence agencies" and the Kenyan regime have "identified."

Between the totalitarian Islamofascist rebels on the one hand, and the repressive "democracies" and make-believe democracies like Kenya trying to crush them (and eliminate dissent in the process) on the other, a normal human being must say: a pox on both their houses.

1]  A fellow Uzbek described the 29-year-old killer to the BBC as a malcontented loner. Apparently ISIS propaganda provided him with an explanation for his unhappiness, and ideas for discharging his rage on random strangers. The attack occured around 3 PM on Tuesday October 31. If this pathetic, malevolent jerk had waited a few hours, he could have attacked the annual Halloween parade just north of where he attacked. It's claimed a million people were there. He could have disrupted fun for a million people. Or in a few days this Sunday there's the annual New York Marathon, a major event that such an attack could potentially wreck. Yet the city mayor, Clinton machine politician Bill deBlasio, has been carrying on as if it's 9/11 all over again. (De Blasio insisted on hogging the mic at a "news conference" the next morning with the Governor, the city police and fire commissioners, the boss of the New York City FBI field office, and other government poohbahs.) So in terms of disrupting life in the city, this nasty fool was inept. Most of the disruption has come from the reaction of "the authorities."

The BBC calls the Uzbek truck attack "the main news" today, thus continuing the Western media's bad practice of inflating the significance of violent acts by people who self-align with ISIS, encouraging more attacks, and adding to ISIS' stature. Not only is it disproportional to the significance of these events, it makes the "terrorism problem" WORSE. And of course the U.S. media is waving the attack like a bloody flag. The "coverage" of what this one unhappy asshole did is nonstop, repetitive, and way overdone.

Here's some perspective: every year, about 250 pedestrians are killed in New York City by motor vehicles, plus about 50 bicyclists. So this is 8 more. It makes no difference to the victims whether it was accidental or deliberate or what the motive of the driver might have been. Dead is dead. Tens of thousands of people a year die in traffic in the U.S. The same goes for "terrorist" knife attacks. Many thousands of people a year get stabbed. Why is an "ordinary" knife attack yawn-inducing, but a "terrorist" one an occasion for near-hysteria? No good reason. The bad reasons are political: To induce the population to submit to police state measures and acquiesce in endless wars abroad. Those wars, by the way, are the motivation for the "homeland" attacks using trucks and knives and occasionally guns. That doesn't necessarily mean ending the military role against Islamofascism is the correct course of action. It means that it is disingenuous and dishonest to pretend the attacks are acts of inexplicable madness. (The Uzbek has already been labeled a "madman" by NYC radio station WCBS. His motives are comprehensible. To understand is not to condone.)

2]  "Al Jazeera Investigates - Inside Kenya's Death Squads," on YouTube.com.

Payment Extracted From Russian Government for Liquidation of Aleppo

As the murderous Assad regime snuffs out the last pockets of resistance to its evil reign in the city of Aleppo, Syria, a 22-year-old Turkish policeman took it upon himself to impose a small price on Russia for its aerial bombardment of the city, including all of the hospitals. Shouting " Don't forget Aleppo, don't forget Syria!" the off-duty cop shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, at "a posh art gallery" in the Turkish capital of Ankara. [1]

A video of the incident aired on Turkish media showed the man, a riot policeman named Mevlut Mert Altintas proclaiming in Arabic  "We are the descendants of those who supported the Prophet Muhammad, for jihad." We see once again that it often takes a zealot or fanatic to have the courage (and indifference to his personal fate) to sacrifice oneself and attack into the teeth of Power. (Some reports say Altintas was killed. If not, he's in for some savage torture. For one thing, the Erdogan regime will want him to “confess” to “the conspiracy” that Erdogan and Putin have already posited led to this killing.)

Edward Snowden in a way fits the description of a self-sacrificing zealot, but of course his action was non-violent and very beneficial, if ultimately as futile as the assassination of the ambassador. But in both cases, at least some cost is imposed on the oppressors of humanity. That is worthwhile.

The day before the assassination, the Russian, Turkish, and Iranian foreign and war ministers met in Moscow to conspire on the ongoing crushing of the rebellion of the Syrian people against the despotic and ultra-cruel regime of Bashar al-Assad, an absolute dictator who inherited the dictatorship from his mass murderer father Hafez. (No slouch in the killing department himself. Like father, like son, apparently.)

With utter predictability, the state terrorist Russian president Vladimir Putin, Karlov's boss, immediately branded the killing terrorism, and vowed revenge. “The only answer to the murder of the Russian ambassador to Turkey must be the intensification of the struggle against terrorism,” Putin said darkly on Russian national television. “And the bandits will feel it,” he added menacingly. (No doubt to the approval of Donald Trump, who admires "strength." That makes Trump an authoritarian, of course, since fetishizing power is a key aspect of authoritarianism. But then Trump's authoritarianism has been on display for years, in his role as a Business Boss.) the Kremlin foreign ministry also weighed in with the"T" word, calling it “a terrorist attack,” I'd call it retribution for Russian crimes against humanity.

Showing he understands nothing, Putin also misunderstood the avenging gunman's motive entirely, even though the assassin said quite clearly what his motive was. Putin framed the killing in conspiratorial terms, seeing a “provocation aimed at rupturing ties between Russia and Turkey” in the act. "The crime that has been committed is undoubtedly a provocation aimed at derailing the ties between Russia and Turkey, as well as the peace process in Syria," Oh, undoubtedly. and I just love your "peace process" in Syria! Nothing like bombing people into submission to achieve "peace."

Yes yes I know, there are jihadists in Syria. But the 80% of the Syrian population that oppose Assad are not "jihadists" and "terrorists." This uprising began with street protests inspired by the Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia. The Assad regime responded by murdering protesters in the streets, and kidnapping and torturing people. THEN people took up arms, when they had no choice to defend themselves. Obama and his minions intoned "Assad Must Go," but Obama didn't want to support the rebellion with the necessary arms, especially anti-aircraft small arms, in part out of fear they'd end up in jihadists' hands. After a year or two, jihadists did appear in Syria, so Obama could rationalize, See? I was right.

The mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, hopped on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, opining that the killer's intent was to disrupt Turkish-Russian relations. Why not take the gunman at his word? He said, shouted why he did it!

I guess politicians, being cold, callous beings, cannot imagine that there are people motivated by the suffering of others. That is just beyond their ken. So they must fabricate imaginary conspiracies and convoluted political conjectures. (The U.S. media and other elite sectors do that all the time too. For example, J. Edgar Hoover, the now-deceased longtime FBI secret police chief, thought that the movement for black civil rights was a "communist conspiracy." And president Lyndon Johnson thought that the massive popular movement against his war on Vietnam was being created in Moscow! He ordered the CIA to uncover this "plot" that somehow turned millions of Americans into zombie puppets of the Kremlin. I kid you not. That is how blind our rulers are to their own criminality- that they have to deny any possibility of fault by themselves that is provoking opposition from normal humans. Positing malign conspiracies is one way rulers evade facing up to their own responsibility for the reactions provoked by their crimes and oppression.)

The destruction of Aleppo, which has included the systematic bombardment of every hospital in the city and targeting of schools, among other atrocities, is characterized as a "liberation" from "terrorists" by the cynical Russian and Syrian governments, rhetoric adopted by knee-jerk anti-Americans in Western countries whose human rights principles are apparently lower in priority than their need to assume that whatever side the U.S. opposes are Good Guys. This stems from their simple-minded, lazy habit of seeing the world in binary terms. (Readers of this blog will have no trouble discerning that I am unsparing in my criticism of the U.S. for its crimes. Those who cannot see other sources of evil in the world have a most peculiar blind spot) Even though the U.S. has been largely AWOL in Syria, these ideologues blame the U.S. for the Syrian tragedy. They also consider Hillary Clinton a "warmonger" for wanting to intervene. Had the U.S. supported the rebellion in the first year, the Syrian people would have had a fighting chance to free themselves of the gothically cruel Assad regime. A bombing campaign to destroy Assad's air force would have stopped the dropping of barrel bombs and chemical agents, for example. Russia only sent in its air force to assist Assad in his slaughter a year ago. (The uprising is now five years old.)

The Washington Post claims that "Russian authorities vowed to reveal a larger plot — and some [UNNAMED] in Moscow suggested that the West was to blame for its support of moderate rebel factions in Syria." Unlike how it treats with ridicule discussion of actual conspiracies by the U.S. Deep State, this fanciful conspiracy theorizing is reported respectfully by U.S. media like the Post.

"Putin stopped short of that, [i.e. of blaming the West] saying only, 'We need to know who guided the hand of the murderer.” That is, who to take out our rage on. [3]

There he goes again, with a conspiracy theory. As if passionate (or obsessive, if you want to put a negative spin on it) individuals need to be someone else's puppet to act. Not everyone on earth is a puppet or a puppet-master, Putin.

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, already "knew" it was a conspiracy, and what it was about: “We know [sic] that this is a provocation aiming to destroy the normalization process of Turkey-Russia relations,” Erdogan said immediately in a speech he rushed to give. “But the Russian government and the Turkish republic have the will to not fall into that provocation.” It must be nice to be able to "know" things without having to investigate or discover actual facts. Makes life so much easier to just assume that whatever you want to believe is true. [4] 

Note Erdogan's repeated use of the word "provocation," a favorite word of Russian conspiracy-mongers that traces back to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and probably earlier. Do I detect pandering to the Russians?

Erdogan called Putin to offer condolences, and the two reportedly pledged cooperation against "terrorism." "Terrorism" being code for opposition to state power, including non-violent opposition or even just protest. That's also the U.S. function definition, by the way, as the FBI, DHS, et al routinely brand protesters considered "left wing," such as the Occupy Movement, "terrrorists." So see? Even enemies can agree on something!

Here's a bet, Turkish autocrat Erdogan will blame Gulen for the assassination, or else the Kurds.

One more thing. A single man, motivated by conviction, has imposed more of a cost on Russia for its crimes in Syria than the Mighty Superpower Tough Talking U.S. The U.S. has only jawboned and condemned Russia over Syria. It hasn't even imposed economic sanctions, as it did to punish Russia for interfering with the U.S. takeover of Ukraine. That speaks volumes about actual U.S. "values" and goals. It doesn't care one whit about human rights, self-determination, or freedom.

Unwanted politics intrudes at "a posh art gallery."

A minion of autocracy bites the dust. He won't be dining on caviar tonight.

1]  "Russian ambassador Andrey Karlov shot dead in Ankara," Aljazeera, December 20, 2016. Aljazeera quotes the gunman thusly:

"'Don't forget Aleppo, don't forget Syria,' the attacker said in Turkish after gunning down the ambassador, as seen on a video shared by Turkish media from the scene.

"'Whoever took part in this cruelty will pay the price, one by one... Only death will take me from here,' the man said while holding a pistol.

"He then continued in Arabic, saying: 'We are the descendants of those who supported the Prophet Muhammad, for jihad.'"

2] "Turkish police officer, invoking Aleppo, guns down Russian ambassador in Ankara," Washington Post, December 19, 2016. The New York Times quoted Putin in almost the same words,  but claims he made the remarks "in an emergency meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and other top officials." The Times version of the quote is  “There can be only one answer to this — stepping up the fight against terrorism, and the bandits will feel this.” "Russian Ambassador to Turkey Is Assassinated in Ankara," NY Times, December 19. The Times quoted the gunman as declaiming,  “God is great! Those who pledged allegiance to Muhammad for jihad. God is great!” The Post has him yelling, “We are those who pledged jihad to Muhammad!” Referring to Syria, he added, “Every single person who has a share in this atrocity will pay for it!”

3]  Washington Post, ibid.

4] New York Times, op cit. Funny thing, the guy who messed up Turkish-Russian relations was Erdogan himself. About a year ago, he had his jets shoot down a Russian fighter-bomber over Syria next to the Turkish border (the Turks and U.S. media falsely claimed or implied it was shot down overflying Turkey- it had strayed for a few seconds over the border but was shot down over Syria) because Erdogan was unhappy that the Russians were bombing ethnic Turkmen Syrian rebels. The Russians responded by cutting off the lucrative traffic of Russian vacationers to Turkey. This changed Erdogan's attitude, so he mended fences with Russia. 

Turkey's role in Syria is a mass of contradictions, and shows what a treacherous sea of boiling cross-currents "the conflict" there is. Turkey mainly wants to destroy the Kurds, which the U.S. supports in the Kurds resistance to Assad. But the U.S. makes distinctions between "terrorist" Kurds and "moderate" (i.e. "Good Guy") Kurds, which the Turks don't. Turkey for a long time supported jihadists in an underhanded fashion, allowing them to cross the Turkish border and obtain supplies through Turkey. Jihadists are U.S. enemy Number 1, or maybe Number 2, after Russia, these days, depending on which American ideologue/polemicist/apparatchik/or general you ask, and the day of the week.

Assad has shelled and bombed Turkish border villages several times, and Turkey semi-wants to see Assad gone. Russia is backing Assad in a major way, along with Iran, which has sent troops to help Assad crush the Syrian people, and the Lebanese "terrorist" (to the West) militia Hezbollah is also fighting on Assad's behalf. (Or rather it's the militia arm of Hezbollah, which is a religious/political organization and movement.) So U.S. ally Turkey, where the U.S. has air bases, is bombing U.S.-backed Kurds in Syria, and Assad foe Turkey is getting friendly and cooperative with main Assad backer Russia, whose air force is pulverizing rebel-held cities and towns. 

To make things more interesting, various Arabian peninsula Sunni autocracies- and the U.S. is good buddies with all those repressive monarchies, and supplies them with weapons and munitions and training- are funneling weapons and supplies to the jihadists in Syria-  the jihadists the U.S. wants to exterminate.. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are known to be doing this. 

But no hard feelings: the U.S. is currently helping the Saudis and other associated oil monarchies wage an aerial bombardment campaign of terror against Yemen. They've bombed 58 hospitals so far, with the jets the U.S. sold them, dropping the bombs the U.S. sold them, and flying to and from their targets with the aid of U.S. tanker planes refueling the jets dropping the bombs. And U.S. officers are in the Saudi command posts helping pick targets.

Is that all clear now?

Turkey Providing Material Support to Terrorism, And Destroying UNESCO World Heritage Sites à la ISIS

Certain more-thoughtful precincts of the U.S. elites occasionally fret over how to square the circle of glaring U.S. contradictions. This phenomenon gets manifested from time to time in New York Times articles that reveal more of reality than is standard in that publication, sometimes with sympathy for some victims, but that generally end with a throwing-up-of-hands attitude, at a loss for a solution.

Such an article was published today on the Times' website. [1]

The contradiction in question this time concerns the fact that Turkey and the U.S. have been operating at cross-purposes, to say the least, in Syria. The most effective fighting force against ISIS and the other Islamofascists (the main enemy of the U.S. in Syria, as the U.S. government sees it) are the Kurds.

But Turkey is waging war on the Kurds, both in Syria and in Turkey. Even in Iraq, in fact, where it has attacked Kurds.

And Turkey is even backing some of the Islamofascists.

But Turkey is a member of the U.S.-created-and-dominated military alliance, NATO. And has key military bases that the U.S. uses, particularly air bases, from which the U.S. is now flying sorties against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. (Turkey has been a key base for U.S. espionage and military activities since World War II. Turkey was the base from which many U-2 spyplane flights were launched over the Soviet Union. The CIA ran a fake defector program against the Soviet Union from Turkey. One of those well-prepared fake defectors was U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.)

It's as if such articles are throat-clearing exercises to get the attention of the executive managers of U.S. imperialism. Like a tap on the shoulder saying "What are you going to do about this?"

The article doesn't explicitly say what I stated in the title of this essay. That would be too disruptive. The New York Times only very rarely engages in boat-rocking. But the following excerpts show that my title is true.

All emphases that follow are mine.

"Erdogan has offered limited help in the fight against ISIS, despite years of American lobbying. That has pushed the United States to rely more and more on the P.Y.D., which it views as distinct from the P.K.K. American Special Operations troops now arm, equip and advise these Kurdish fighters, even as Turkey shells their bases farther west — and pays Islamist militias [aka 'terrorists' as designated by the U.S.] to attack them."

"Islamist militias" are what are usually called "terrorists" in the U.S. media, and by the U.S. government. The Times discreetly avoids naming the actual "militias" it is referring to.

The U.S. designates the fighting groups in Syria it thinks are okay as the "moderate" ones.The "Islamist" ones, like the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their ilk, are the "terrorists."

Of course, for the New York Times, it is literally unthinkable that Turkey is breaking U.S. law by "providing material support to terrorists," or that Turkey should be on the State Department list of "state sponsors of terrorism."

Or at least, they don't want anyone reading the New York Times to have such thoughts cross their minds.

Then there's the destruction of UNESCO world heritage sites- the same crimes the U.S. and European medias are so exercised about (rightly, if hypocritically) when ISIS does it.

The article makes plain that Kurdish towns and cities are being systematically leveled by Turkish army artillery and tank shelling.

"In Diyarbakir [Turkey], the capital of a largely Kurdish province, [Turkish] artillery and bombs have destroyed much of the historic district, which contains Unesco world heritage sites. Churches, mosques and khans that have stood for centuries lie in ruins. Tourism has collapsed. Images of shattered houses and dead children are stirring outrage in other countries where Kurds live: Iraq, Syria and Iran."
The author also describes the destruction of Cizre by Turkish shelling, and that a similar fate awaits the surrounded and besieged city of Nusaybin:

"...it has been an outpost and a battleground for a half-dozen empires over the past 3,000 years, from the Aramaeans to the Ottomans. It still contains Roman ruins and one of the Middle East’s oldest churches. It has been a Kurdish town since a century ago, when Christian residents fled southward from Turkish pogroms that started during the upheavals of World War I."

Again, the obvious similarity to ISIS crimes is overlooked.

One difference between ISIS and the Erdogan regime of Turkey is that ISIS makes a point of publicizing its crimes, as it takes a perverse pride in them. It sees its destruction and murders as making ideological points. The Turks, on the other hand, ban journalists from the cities they are laying waste to. Typical of states, they seek to hide their crimes, clumsily, from the rest of the world. (The Times reporter had to do some sneaking around to get the story. Which is fine.)

It's not just in Turkey that the U.S. has tied itself up in a ball of contradictions. The same is the case with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, with Afghanistan. In all these cases, its "allies" are part of the problem, indeed the root of the problem in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

On top of all its strategic incoherent, the U.S. slathers a thick layer of incredibly hypocritical, self-righteous, moralistic rhetoric about "terrorism" and "freedom," and applies draconian laws (and assassinations) in extremely selective, biased fashion. This rotten ideological crust is supposed to hide the political incoherence from public view.

Which, with the help of the loyal U.S. media, it largely does.

1] "Behind the Barricades of Turkey’s Hidden War: A simmering conflict with the Kurds threatens to consume an American ally and inflame an already-unstable region," New York Times, May 24, 2016.

Turkey Bombards America's Kurds in Syria

The wars in the Middle East are looking more and more like a free-for-all. What a Pandora's Box the Bush-Cheney regime recklessly ripped open when it invaded Iraq!

The would-be Sultan of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has dreams of Ottoman Empire glory, has been attacking armed Kurds wherever he can find them. First he restarted the war of extermination against the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla organization that arose as a reaction to the extreme repression of Kurds in Turkey. (For decades, Turkey sought to eliminate Kurdish identity completely, which is to say, the Kurds were subjected to a genocidal assault under the legal definition of genocide. There is a popular misunderstanding that genocide necessarily means physical extermination. It actually is defined as destroying a people by whatever means, or attempting to.) Then he extended his war over the border into both Syria and Iraq. The Iraqi government has feebly protested the invasion of Iraq by Turkish troops attacking Kurdish forces. Those Kurds have been the main bulwark against the advance of the hated ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State, reviled for their Saudi-style beheadings.

The latest Turkish attacks against the Kurds is the aerial and artillery attacks on Kurdish forces in Syria. The BBC, and thus we can assume by extension the British government, supports, given today's reporting, which was sympathetic to the Turkish position. For exanple, they hauled on air a woman from the reactionary U.S. Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, to say that the PKK and the other Kurds the Turks are now attacking are birds of a feather. [1] Of course, the Kurds the Turks are now trying to destroy in Syria are also the main U.S. proxy ground forces against ISIS in Syria.

So Obama gave his vice president, Joseph Biden, an errand, to ask Erdoğan to please stop bombing the U.S.' Kurds. Erdoğan, predictably, refused to comply. Which Obama probably foresaw and sought to avoid being humiliated, thus the delegation of the task to Biden.

So where do we stand? The U.S. and whoever it can get is fighting ISIS. The U.S. is also against the Assad regime, but isn't fighting him and doesn't want its proxies to fight him. ISIS is fighting Assad. The Russians are fighting "terrorists," using the Assad regime definition of that word- namely anyone opposing Assad or even living in areas not under regime control. The U.S. is fighting "terrorists," namely ISIS, the al-Nusra front, and the always-mentioned-but-never specified "associated forces." (Being vague gives the U.S. the freedom to attack anyone they suddenly decide they don't like.)

The Iranians are fighting everyone Assad and the Russians are fighting, in Syria. So they're a U.S. Enemy in Syria, even though they're fighting ISIS.

In Iraq, the Iranians are allied with the same government the U.S. is backing, and against ISIS. But they're still an Enemy.

U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey is hosting U.S. warplanes that are bombing targets in Syria and Iraq, in support of the Kurds that Turkey is bombing and shelling.

Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oiligarchies support Sunni extremists like al-Nusra. But they're U.S. allies, and Saudi Arabia has supposedly offered to contribute "special forces" (commandos) to fight in Syria against- well, the Sunni extremist ISIS. They've even contributed a few warplanes to bombing. (Most of their forces are tied up destroying Yemen at the moment.) Britain, France, all the usual suspects, are pitching in with bombing and/or aerial surveillance, although Canada, under a new liberal regime, will no longer drop bombs, just help look for targets. (The new prime minister Trudeau is apparently a peacenik.)

Is that all clear now?

I didn't think so.



1] The Wilson center is named for a former extremely racist president of the U.S., who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act (under which people who spoke against Wilson's entry into the First World War were imprisoned, First Amendment "free speech rights" be damned), the Palmer raids, in which thousands of leftists were rounded up without any judicial involvement- carried out by one J. Edgar Hoover, heading the precursor of the FBI, which he went on to run as the top secret police chief in America- and other depredations against human rights. The actual history of Wilson's regime- which is to say, truth- has been replaced by an absurd myth of Wilson as a noble idealist and liberal who believed in self-determination for people! Thus is the power of propaganda manifested yet again.

The lady "scholar" from the Wilson Center made sure to carry out her political and ideological duties by cueing us in on which side is the Good Guys and which the Bad in the Turkish bombing of Kurds. The Kurds have been fighting "a NATO army" for a decade, she gratuitously put in. I suppose that's one (twisted) way to look at it. Or the Turkish army waged a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign against the Kurds for a decade, "disappearing" people, torturing them, razing villages, and killing tens of thousands of people. People who would have settled for being allowed to speak their own language, publish their own newspapers, broadcast in their own tongue, and just allowed to be Kurds. But that was asking too much, various Turkish regimes decreed. The BBC forgot to mention the reality of Turkish state oppression of the Kurds. And commonly the death toll is blamed on the PKK, or on "the conflict," even though it was Turkish state forces that killed theoverwhelming majority of the now-dead.

By the way, that NATO army also invaded Cyprus and imposed its will on the Greek inhabitants there, supposedly to aid Turkish residents. Greece is in NATO too.

U.S. Hoists Its Flag Over Nest of Espionage and Subversion In Havana

Technically this den of iniquity is called the "U.S. Embassy." Like all U.S. embassies, it is a base for CIA spies and military "attaches," who also have an espionage function.

And like any U.S. embassy located in a nation whose government the U.S. wants to change to one more to its liking, it is also a hive of subversive activities. The Cubans should study carefully what the U.S. did not too long ago in Ukraine. (It was willing to spend $2 billion there, according to a boast by Victoria "Wicked Witch" Nuland, the neocon whom Obama  has as an assistant secretary of state for "European Affairs," to overthrow the previous elected government.)

This particular infection-point of malign U.S. power was previously the "U.S. Interests Section," prior to the decision of the Obama regime to reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, which were broken off by Kennedy in 1961 in favor of a campaign of aggression, terrorism, and economic warfare that continued for decades.

An example of the prior activities of this "Interests Section" was the hoisting of large, provocative, insulting banners aimed at the streets below, with the apparent purpose of inducing the Cubans to hate Fidel Castro and overthrow his government. (It didn't work.)

Secretary of State John "Skull And Bones" Kerry flew into Cuba for the rag-hoisting ceremony, and to lecture the Cubans about what he called "democracy" and human rights. (Since the U.S. is very good at destroying both of those, I assume he was being ironic or facetious when he exhorted the Cuban government to provide more of both. But that assumption is wrong, of course. He was actually being dementedly cynical.)

One "issue" the U.S. wants "resolved" is to extort millions of dollars from Cuba to "compensate" Americans who lost property in Cuba after the revolution 56 years ago. Parts of the U.S. media are participating in this extortion campaign, with both the New York Times ("The Newspaper of Record," that's us!- they proclaim) and the U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR running sob stories about children of property owners wanting their holdings paid for or returned to them. So far, the U.S. media hasn't run any stories about all the Cubans murdered by U.S.-sponsored terrorists, or the losses suffered when the U.S. infected Cuba's sugar and tobacco crops, and pig herds, with diseases, or poisoned sugar for export, or snuck in lubricating oil that made engines wear out ten times faster than normal (a Texas engineer working for the CIA boasted in print of coming up with that one) or the billions lost due to the U.S. interfering with Cuban trade, forcing foreign nations and governments to boycott Cuba. (Because, in case you didn't know, the U.S. rules the world.)

Here's another "issue" Cuba could raise. Over the years, U.S. courts have awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to the families of "victims of terrorism." I mean per person killed. They've entered such judgments against the PLO, Iran, and others. I suggest Cuban courts award the families of the hundreds killed by U.S.-sponsored terrorism hundreds of millions of dollars (in pesos) apiece. After all, since the U.S. regards itself as a model for all nations to follow, and expects Cuba to emulate it, I think Cuba should definitely show itself to be a good pupil and do this.

And get the fuck out of Guantanamo Bay, U.S.!