By Sally Dugman

If you displease certain government and military operatives, they WILL attack you !

I don’t write under my true legal name. Doing so, I found out, is a liability and a potential danger. How do I know?

Before Bush Jr.’s war in Iraq when the war frenzy for it was being purposefully whipped up, I knew that the war (as Alan Greenspan later confirmed) was all about gaining control of Iraqi oil, as well as destabilizing Iraq enough to dominate the broken country, as well as gain power in Middle Eastern political and economic affairs.

So sick at heart and distraught from the war having started, I wrote articles about those aims being the case as soon as the slaughtering invasion by the U.S. military was well underway.

Then in response to one of my writings posted on an internationally viewed website, a bunch of U.S. Marines wrote comments that that they knew where I live and proved it was so that they had somehow found my address. Then, they wrote that they were coming after me and to my home in order to kill me as they hated my views about their war!

So I told of this threat to my policeman neighbor and asked for protection. Of course, though, the town in which I lived would not and could not have a protective guard at my home 24/7. What a scary period, then, that was for me as I constantly was on guard for an assailant.

From another angle: Before Bush, Jr. (the Shrub) sent US military might to Iraq in an effort to gain dominance over its oil, along with greater concerted power and control in the Middle East, he knew that he and the US Vice President had to whip up the American public support into shape to desire a war since Americans are cautious to spend tax dollars on weapons of mass destruction, as well as send their sons and daughters, wife’s and husbands overseas to get maimed or killed in combat.

So the twosome and cohorts hatched several plans in tandem to work into the public imagination a desired state of war frenzy. (It’s called development of propaganda and this time around, it included amongst other features encouraging the American citizens to believe that Iraqis were responsible for 9/11, that it wouldn’t be too costly to undertake the war (since Bush Jr. and Cheney tooted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and needed to be stopped) and that (best of all as a ploy to convince Americans), Iraqis liked killing premature Kuwaiti babies in incubators.

In fact and quite to the contrary, Saddam had even asked permission from Bush to invade Kuwait as there is not a big history of firm boundaries in the Middle due to nomadic tribes existing for a long time rather than Nation-states being the arranged and accepted legal model for National boundary lines being drawn.

On account, there is valuable land with resources in dispute between several countries, including between Iraq and Kuwait. So Saddam was purposefully given a green light to send Iraq troops into Kuwait over the matter after which the mock-teary 19 year old niece of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. got on public tv (and I vividly remember her) and convincingly pleaded without frequently blinking her eyes to indicate lying that Iraq’s troops swarmed into Kuwait and many went directly to a hospital with incubators holding fragile, premature infants and unhooked them from their electrical connections so that they would gradually and painfully die from lack of heat and oxygen.

That created fictional vision was in fact right out of playbook of Edward Bernal’s, the father of propaganda! How more repulsive can the butchery look than that? Why — that happening is as bad as the fabrication of WWI Huns cutting off the milk providing breasts of white women and throwing their babies down in wells or the butchery that Bibi Netanyahu is carrying out in Palestine right now to thousands of civilians, including mere babies and fragile elders.

And this is the result

So is this a case of “what goes around — comes around” for those who manage to survive the utter carnage? Indeed, there is really no real escape for those involved in wartime nightmare — whether involved willingly so or not.

From The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations:

“The most interesting man in the world.” “Reach out and touch someone.” “Finger-lickin’ good.” Such advertising slogans have become fixtures of American culture, and each year millions now tune into the Super Bowl as much for the ads as for the football.

While no single person can claim exclusive credit for the ascendancy of advertising in American life, no one deserves credit more than a man most of us have never heard of: Edward Bernays.
As Alex Krainer comments:

“Whatever war in history you study, you find that, as a rule, people are hugely reluctant to go to war, and that especially includes soldiers and military generals. Wars are also hugely expensive and almost never go according to plan. Invariably, they result in great destruction, economic decline and tragic loss of life. I’m old enough to remember that political leaders used to talk about war as the solution of the last resort and supposedly wars were such serious business that they could only be declared by legislative bodies of people’s representatives in a large majority.”

All the same wars are highly lucrative to those invested in the arms industry. In fact, it’s especially so if one has stock in companies manufacturing U.S. bombs such as the one that made the U.S. 2,000 lb. one deliberately sent to kill off this little six year old and her would-be dedicated rescuers.

In fact, the bomb that was sent and identified after the fact as a U.S. made one was discovered by wreckage at the scene while this image pictured below is all that is left of the two brave and determined medics in their ambulance, who were told by Israelis that they could drive to to the scene to get the girl Hind after which the bomb (outrageously paid for by U.S. taxpayers) struck and gunfire erupted.

The ambulance after the attack.

Moreover and according to the factual account in Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help:

“We got the coordination, we got the green light," PRCS spokeswoman, Nibal Farsakh, told me earlier this week. "On arrival, [the crew] confirmed that they could see the car where Hind was trapped, and they could see her. The last thing we heard is continuous gunfire."

So it alltragically and horrifyingly goes. …Always, you likely will be targeted by one group or another that either wants to get rid of you altogether as is happening in Palestine right now and as was menaced toward me. In fact, it is an ongoing phenomenon that repeats again and again.

For example, the warmongers have no remorse at all, it seems, and sleep well at night. At the same time, we face these noxious variables as described below:

When threatened, should we conform with lock-step in perverse obedience to the State's dictates, outlooks and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each other of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's vision: "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

Do you know that consideration,Mr. Trump, or are you willing to deport me or lock me up for caring about Palistinian welfare as you involve yourself and MY country in a huge and ongoing act of genocide?

A few years ago, an American Civil Liberties Union report pointed out, "Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as ‘low level terrorism’.” [1]

Despite that DoD officials removed the offensive section from their educational resources at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance was still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies, including with Trump. Indeed the participants one of the first antiwar protests against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960's by peaceable Quakers and FOR members after having discussed Gandhi's Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance. When the film crew on rooftops focused on us, she stood tall, faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful defiance and, simultaneously, throw the corner of her coat over my face. Afterwards, she muttered, "How dare they try to intimidate us!")

This sort of happening in mind, the treatment of Nobel Peace Award winner Aung San Sui Kyi in Myanmar is not necessarily all that different than the response that she'd receive in the USA and, while it's commendable that American spokespersons publicly object to her most recent arrest way back when, they, certainly, might seem to have been a bunch of hypocrites. This is due to the fact that a number of Nobel Peace Award recipients, such as American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), have had difficulties of their own on American soil.

For example, "AFSC’s work, always open and resolutely nonviolent, has been under government surveillance for decades. The Service Committee secured nearly 1,700 pages of files from the FBI under a Freedom of Information request in 1976. These files show that the FBI kept files on AFSC that dated back to 1921. Ten other federal agencies kept files on AFSC, including the CIA, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue Service, Secret Service, and the State Department. The CIA has intercepted overseas mail and cables in the 1950s, and some AFSC offices (and even its staff's homes) have been infiltrated and burglarized in the late 1960s into the 1970s." [2]

In relation, AFSC associate general secretary for justice and human rights, Joyce Miller, asked, “How can we speak of spreading democracy in Iraq [or elsewhere located - S.] while dismantling it here at home?” She further remarked, “Political dissent is fundamental to a free and democratic society. It should not be equated with crime.”

Add to the AFSC problems, those pertaining to Nobel Peace Award recipient Nelson Mandela, who only briefly had the designation "terrorist" removed from his name, under protest by the State Department, so that he no longer suffered travel restrictions from the US government. Yet his travel curtailment was not nearly as awful as was Ramzy Baroud's blockage. He, the editor of Palestine Chronicle, had his US passport seized by a consular officer at an overseas American Embassy [3]. Similarly, Senator Edward Kennedy was, also, flagged by the U.S. no-fly list.

Then again, Ted Kennedy received some, but much less harassment than did Nobel Peace Award winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire after her flight from Guatemala had been directed to Ireland through Houston:

"She was probably tired and ready to get back to Belfast, where her attempts to bring about an end to The Troubles in 1976 made her at 32 the youngest Nobel Peace Prize-winner ever. Since then, she had been given the Pacem in Terris Award by Pope John Paul II, and the United Nations selected her (along with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Jordan's Queen Noor and a dozen or so other fellow Nobel Laureates) as an honorary board member of the International Coalition for the Decade.

"Unfortunately for Maguire, her flight back home to Northern Ireland was routed through Houston, where none of that meant diddly. Federal Customs officials were far less interested in any of that than they were in a box on the back of the transit form she filled out on her flight.

"'They questioned me about my nonviolent protests in USA against the Afghanistan invasion and Iraqi war,' Maguire said later in a statement. 'They insisted I must tick the box in the Immigration form admitting to criminal activities.'

"Maguire was detained for two hours -- grilled once, fingerprinted, photographed, and grilled again. She missed her flight home. She was only released after an organization she helped found -- the Nobel Women's Initiative -- started kicking up a fuss." [4]

One can add to her troubles countless other ones wherein human rights and environmental supporters have been repeatedly hassled for no other reason than that they're holding views that don't jive with positions at any number of U.S. government institutions. One needn't return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions. For example, Stephen Lendman, a peace advocate and writer in his seventies with a permanent knee injury that delimits travel, had been repeatedly investigated by the FBI.

At the same time, he is joined by myriad others such as assorted activists in Maryland whose names were put on federal terrorist lists by state police who infiltrated their groups. [5] As such, their perfectly legal activities, freedom of speech and right to unhindered assembly have been criminalized.

Simultaneously, there's a certain inescapable irony and disingenuous quality presented by the Western government heads who are harshly critical of any Iran crackdown on dissenting citizens while they, themselves, condone similar iron fisted policies in their own lands. Their two-faced position is barely hidden beneath the surface of their mock concern for the well-being of Iranian protesters as they urge their own and allied troops into battle, show little (if any) sincere remorse over the slaughter of masses of civilians that happen in the process and make sure that demonstrators at home are disregarded, denigrated or preemptively rounded up as happened at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Then again, one might find himself in pretty good company if he were singled out as unpatriotic and treacherous for holding viewpoints or undertaking actions that go contrary to the perspectives that a certain hawkish and totalitarian segment of society holds. All the same, every method conceivable might be used to hunt down the offenders and, when taken to the extreme, render their seemingly provocative positions ineffectual by any means possible, including imprisonment and murder.

Anyone who doubts this to be the case needs only to remember about what happened to people like Howard Fast; the slain Freedom Riders Andy Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner; the thirteen shot students at Kent State University at which Ohio National Guardsman fired sixty-seven rounds over a thirteen second period, and scores of others who have stood against mainstream policies.

Meanwhile, stigmatizing dissidents is a fairly common practice. As such, “There were 1.1 million people on the [U.S.] Terrorist Watch List and there was a 35 per cent error rate, minimum, for that list,” according to ACLU's Michael German. [6]

Furthermore, the overzealous and aggressive surveillance tactics used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to check the public's e-mails, telephone calls and other communications are the same ones as were in use during George W. Bush's administration. Likewise, the amount of spying on personal exchanges is as high as it ever was, as well as is tracking specific individuals down through their IRS records.

In relation to former claims by Justice Department and national security officials that the overcollection was unintentional, prior House representative, Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey and Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, commented “Some actions are so flagrant that they can't be accidental.” Additionally, the act of tracking e-mailed transmissions and other interactions has seemed in violation of federal law according to lawyers at the Justice Department. Regardless, the practice continues.

At the same time, the decision to designate social activists as troublemakers, while singling them out for intimidation, threats and investigations, carries serious legal and political implications in democratic societies.The further measure of subjecting them to the sorts of difficulties that Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ramzy Baroud, AFSC members and innumerable others have endured is clearly based in xenophobic, paranoid and despotic thinking. It embodies the kind of authoritarian mentality and oppressive activities that one finds in the worst types of tyrannical regimes.

As Harry S. Truman suggested, "Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." Due to this fear, are we, then, to all conform with lock-step in perverse obedience to the State's dictates, outlooks and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each other of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's vision: "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

References:

[1] Pentagon Rebrands Protest as “Low-Level Terrorism”
(http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/pentagon-rebrands-protest-as-low-level-terrorism/).

[2] American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
(http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0201-03.htm).

[3] "Punishing activists or pursuing terrorists?" by Maggie Mitchell Salem in Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy. (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GL10Aa01.html).

[4] Nobel Prize Winner Gets Hassled At Bush Intercontinental ...
(http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/05/29-8).

[5] Police Spied on Activists In Md. - washingtonpost.com
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2008/07/17/AR2008071701287.html) and Md. Police Put Activists' Names On Terror Lists - ...

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/
article/2008/10/07/AR2008100703245.html).

[6] One third of FBI Terror Watch List are innocent people | Top ...
(http://www.russiatoday.ru/Top_News/2009-06-17/
One_third_of_FBI_Terror_Watch_List
_are_innocent_people.html).

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Sally Dugman lives in and writes from MA, USA.