At his presidential daily briefing on August 6th, Where the threat of al qaeda operatives Hijacking planes was discussed, Bush disdainfully told his c. I. A. Briefer... George w. Bush: All right,
you've covered your ass now. Stone: Yet with a straight face, Bush told a news conference in April 2004... Had I had any inkling whatsoever That the people were gonna fly airplanes into buildings, We would have moved heaven and earth to save the country.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
US troops invaded Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island with 100,000 inhabitants. Reagan claimed it was a Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. As in one of his old Westerns, he sent 7,000 american soldiers into battle. Then in media, supposedly for their own safety, he offered government footage instead. The entire op was bungled from the start. 19 soldiers died and more than 100 were wounded, as a small force of poorly armed Cuban construction workers resisted. 9 helicopters were lost. The invasion from a military POV was a farce.
Similar atrocities occurred in neighboring El Salvador, where US trained troops stabbed de-capitated, raped and machine gunned 767 civilians in the village of El Mozote in late 1981, including 358 children under age 13. Congress ended up funneling almost $6 billion to this tiny country making it the largest recipient of US foreign aid per capita in the world. Wealthy landlords were running the right-wing death squads that murdered thousands of suspected leftists. The death toll from the war reached 70,000.
Reagan defended the covert war by saying in 1984: The Nicaraguan people are trapped in a totalitarian dungeon by a dictatorship made all the more dangerous by the unwanted presence of thousands of Cuban, Soviet block and radical Arab helpers. He went so far as to call the Contras the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. His moral equivalence were responsible for most of the deaths of the 20 to 30,000 Nicaraguan civilians during the war.
It was the American war against the poor of the earth, the most easily killed, the collateral damage. As was asked at the beginning, was it really about fighting communism or was it a misunderstood or disguised motivation? It was George Kennen, America's leading early cold war strategist, who went to the heart of the matter in a memorandum written in 1948: 'with 50% percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality, and daydreamings. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization. We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.'
Freelance journalist S. Hersh in nov. 1969 broke the news that a year and a half earlier US forces had massacred up to 500 civilians in the village of My Lai nicknamed Pinkville for its strong enemy sympathies. Babies, pregnant women and old people had been scalped and mutilated as command of the situation broke down. Not a single shot had been clearly fired at US forces. Indicative of the growing dehumanization of this time, and resembling US attitudes towards the Japanese in WW2 65% of Americans told pollsters they were not bothered by the news of massacre. The only officer found guilty was given a partial pardon by Nixon public opinion strongly in favor.
However Kennedy, a decorated veteran of WW2, resisted sending in combat troops. He said to Arthur Schlesinger: The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in 4 days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. Well, it's like taking a drink: the effect wears off and you have to take another.
By this time the Korean police action had become a 2.5 year nightmare and endless maneuvers for useless hill sides as elusive as the jungles of south Vietnam 15 years later. Battling Soviet trained and equipped North Koreans, WW2 hero general Douglas MacArthur had pushed north towards the Chinese border, despite repeated warnings from Beijing ensuring Truman that the Chinese would never enter the war. In the late fall of 1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops streamed across the Yalu river, sending US and allied forces reeling backwards in a frantic retreat. The marines who spearheaded the breakout did not consider it a retreat. "Retreat, hell!" said their commander. "We're just advancing in a different direction". Time magazine called it the worst defeat the US had ever suffered. Truman wrote in his diary: WW3 is here.
When truman finally met with robert oppenheimer in October 1945, he asked him to guess when the russians would develop their own atomic bomb. Oppenheimer did not know. Truman responded that he knew the answer: "never." Clearly surprised by the president's truculent ignorance and frustrated that he did not understand the seriousness of the evolving crisis, Oppenheimer blurted out, "mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands." Truman responded with anger. Truman: I told him the blood was on my hands and to let me worry about that. Afterwards, Truman told dean acheson... Truman: I don't want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again. Oppenheimer was later attacked by right-wing conservatives as an agent of the Soviet Union, and subjected to numerous investigations by the f. B. I. in 1954, his security clearance was revoked. His real crime in the eyes of american authorities was opposing building the new hydrogen bomb, which he considered a weapon of genocide.
This racism prevailed when president roosevelt in February 1942 signed an executive order calling for the evacuation of over 110,000 Japanese and japanese-americans from california oregon and washington on the grounds that they "represented a threat to national security." 70% of them were american citizens.
Even president truman's bigotry Long antedated reports of japanese savagery. As a young man courting his future wife, he wrote: I think one man is as good as another, So long as he's honest and decent and not a nigger or a chinaman. Uncle will says that the lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a chinaman.
