*“Perhaps there is no more fitting tribute…to all wars everywhere – than the closing chapters of Johnny Got His Gun. Published on September 3, 1939, two days after the start of WWII. Dalton Trumbo’s novel about a World War I veteran whose four limbs, face and genitals had been blown away by a shell but has been kept alive in a secret military hospital, as a curiosity. He is deaf, dumb, and blind, and must lift and drop his head against a hospital pillow to tap out - in Morse code - what he wants to tell mankind. He asks that the wretched trunk of his body be placed in a glass case and taken around the world on display. One of the last powerful paragraphs of the book ends this way: ‘I know the truth and you don’t you fools. You fools you fools you fools…” 

“Take me into your churches your great towering cathedrals that have to be rebuilt every fifty years because they are destroyed by war. Carry me in my glass box down the aisles where kings and priests and brides and children at their confirmation have gone so many times before to kiss a splinter of wood from a true cross on which was nailed the body of a man who was lucky enough to die. Set me high on your altars and call on god to look down upon his murderous little children his dearly beloved little children. Wave over me the incense I can’t smell. Swill down the sacramental wine I can’t taste. Drone out the prayers I can’t hear. Go through the old holy gestures for which I have no legs and no arms. Chorus out the hallelujahs I can’t sing. Bring them out loud and strong for me your hallelujahs all of them for me.”

“To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn’t fight. So they were masking the future they were keeping the future a soft quiet deadly secret. They knew that if all the little people all the little guys saw the future they would begin to ask questions and they would find answers that they would say to the guys who wanted them to fight they would say ‘you lying thieving sons-of-bitches we won’t fight we won’t be dead we will live we are the world we are the future and we will not let you butcher us no matter what you say no matter what speeches you make no matter what slogans you write’…

“Remember this. Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots you fierce ones you spawners of hate you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything else in your lives.” — From Hell, Healing and Resistance: Veterans Speak, by Daniel Hallock 
Last week Donald Trump happened to watch the admittedly disturbing TV images of dead and dying Syrian toddlers that had been filmed by unknown videographers from Al-Queda. Those individuals were anti-Assad activists and claimed that the victims had been poisoned by a chemical gas attack. The activists apparently claimed that the perpetrator was Syrian president Assad. The footage could easily have been staged by one of the many very savvy activist groups who regularly film propaganda in the Mideast. 

 There are any number of top notch mass communications and social networking experts on all sides of the various wars that the Cheney/Bush administration and the assorted eager elite war-mongers unleashed with America’s illegal invasion back in 2003, the event that started all the atrocities and war crimes and created the refugee crises that has de-stabilized the entire world. (Actually the event was the controlled demolitions and explosive pulverizations into fine dust of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11/01. (Spend a couple of hours at: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2016/09/duty-to-warn-the-15th-anniversary-of-the-crime-and-cover-up-of-the-century-91101/ for everything one needs to know about the Crime and Cover-up of the 21st Century [and also find out who and what was behind it all.])

The footage proved to be very effective propaganda for the anti-Assad activists, whose likely intent was provoking the previously neutral, very amateurish president and cabinet who have subsequently acted like they didn’t know what a “false flag op” was. Trump’s amateurish Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, immediately fell for the False Flag and by April 5, within a day of first hearing about the event, engaged in a verbal spanking of the Russian ambassador without having any actual knowledge of what really happened. 

And, as usual, the lapdog American press took the bait and immediately jumped to the approved conclusion - thus easily convincing its exquisitely brain-washable, obedient American news consumers that simplistic explanations of complex issues are preferred, right or wrong. 

Case closed: Assad, rather than the large variety of anti-government rebels, was to blame. And the blind flag-waving patriotic majorities here in America were happy to cheer when the alleged “strong man in the White House” reflexively issued the order for a retaliatory air strike to punish the presumed guilty ones (with fingers crossed that it would be proved later to be the guilty parties). 

Strong men from pre-historical times onward never say they are wrong, nor do they ever say “I’m sorry”. Don’t expect any Mea Culpas from the war-mongering types among the ruling elites that have brought us disasters like Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin, the My Lai Massacre and the Massacre in Fallujah (compliments of “Mad Dog” Mattis and company -  [google “James Mattis is a War Criminal”]). Remorseless, shameless, narcissistic, sociopathic, billionaire swamp-dwelling megalomaniacs are everywhere in Washington, DC, Arlington and New York – and have been for decades; and Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex, Deep State-orchestrated conspiracies are the order of the day. (Google “Mike Lofgren and the Deep State”.)

 
Short Memories for American Atrocities; Long Memories for Everybody Else’s

Prejudiced American civilians have angrily inflicted indignities and abuse against innocent non-white, non-Christian people forever, and therefore their prejudiced soldier-sons have usually felt free to inflict indignities, abuse plus rape, plunder, war crimes and wartime atrocities against whomever the moneyed elites have fingered as the latest enemies to go to war against (including Native Americans, foreigners, blacks, gays, non-Christians, Mexicans, Muslims, etc). 

Just in the past week, there have emerged two obvious ways for the Trump amateurs in the White House to blunder into World War III. To find out about more of them, one would have to inquire about the many CIA, Mossad and Pentagon contingency plans that are already in place for America’s military/industrial/congressional complex to bamboozle these rookies into falling for. The Cheney/Bush/Obama administrations fulfilled most of the Pentagon wet dream de-stabilization plans for the Muslim world that were revealed by General Wesley Clark in a Democracy Now interview, The only nation that the Pentagon failed to invade of de-stabilize since he saw those contingency plans in 2007 was Iran. As of this moment, other than the Syria caper, the most obvious one is already happening: the militarily aggressive Carl Vinson aircraft carrier battle group is steaming toward North Korea, risking some sort of provocation.) 

Through history, evidence of American military atrocities and war crimes are routinely black-balled from American mainstream media. We only are allowed to see the deeds of the enemy ‘s bad guys, but never our own. It is next to impossible to recall the details of the Fallujah massacre in 2004 – because we never saw any of it. All the images about the atomic bombs in Japan were confiscated by General McArthur. American sensibilities would have been assaulted and our appetite for atomic war would have been blunted. 

Most Americans never knew there was an atrocious war going on in Korea. It was not called the Hidden War for nothing. And we never saw anything about the My Lai massacre until years later –nor were we told anything about the hundreds of little My Lai massacres that happened routinely during the Vietnam War. 

Publicizing such things would weaken the innate patriotism of the citizenry and inflame some of the otherwise complacent ones to object, resist, revolt or even hurt the stock market. And American elites can’t let that happen. 

But honesty demands that Americans admits that the Pentagon and CIA have been torturing suspects and regularly committing crimes and atrocities in the Mideast – most recently in Yemen and Iraq, but true to form, most Americans have already erased them from their short memories. Self-deluding, self-indicting realities are routinely flushed down the Big Media and Pentagon toilets – and our memories are cleansed, ready for the next False Flag op that will predictably excite us for the duration of the next news cycle.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague

Back at the turn of the last century, the peace-loving nations of the world voted to include themselves in the International Criminal Court (ICC), allowing their nation’s militaries to be subject to judgement for war crimes, crimes against humanity and wartime atrocities. Shamefully, the United States, Israel, China, Iraq, Qatar, Libya, and Yemen were the only seven nations that opposed the treaty that established the ICC. 120 nations became signatories to the treaty. Conservative politicians, emboldened by the outspoken opposition to the treaty from the right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation rejected joining the family of nations, regarding the US as being above the law. 

America’s infamous – and highly profitable - war machine has been universally-recognized as possessing the most lethal weapons in the history of the world ever since WWII. And it has no hesitation to use those weapons (a reality regularly expressed whenever the Pentagon says that “all military options are on the table”). 

International War Crimes Tribunals are courts of law established to try those accused of committing atrocities, war crimes, genocide, torture, and rape, all of which have been documented in the checkered history of American militarism.

What About the Poison Gas
Attack and Trump’s Ill-Advised
Retaliatory Gesture?

With the American war crimes in Iraq and Yemen effectively erased from our recent memory, the American media has been happy to espouse the theory that Assad conspired to use poison gas against ISIS. Having done that, the media has shamelessly accused Assad of being a unique war criminal, thus simultaneously obscuring our own guilt and permitting Trump to jump to conclusions and order the bombing of the Syrian military air base - before any documented evidence of who was actually responsible could be brought before an unbiased tribunal.

Of course, the Al Queda videos went viral, instantly becoming very popular with the anti-Assad, Russophobic Western pro-militarist elites in both NeoLiberal and NeoConservative circles. And of course all their lapdogs in the media - including the once-honorable PBS and NPR - failed to apply investigative journalistic principles to the events, thus endorsing the military response that predictably boosted Trump’s approval ratings. 

Ever since the US military lost every significant post-WWII combat war it engaged in (including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq) they and their war-profiteering industrialists have been casting about for more blame-worthy enemies to justify the annual trillion dollar military spending proposals and war materiel orders that keep the weapons industries and the Pentagon humming. 

A Summary of What is Likely 
to Have Been a False Flag 
Operation in Syria

The narrative accompanying the video footage that swayed Trump showed the now discredited-as-propaganda “White Hat” brigade members trying to hose down the dying poison gas victims. The unknown makers of the video claimed that the chemical agent responsible was military-strength Sarin gas, the same agent that had been allegedly ordered by President Assad against insurgents in 2013. 

Understandably moved by the disturbing images, but without any confirmation by reputable, unbiased observers on the ground as to who were the real culprits, citizen Trump reflexively ordered a massive punitive missile attack by two US Navy destroyers that had been pre-positioned in the eastern Mediterranean. All this, presumably on the advice and consent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the group that gave us Operation Northwoods, Operation Gladio, the Domino Theory, the Gulf of Tonkin False Flag Op, the Kuwaiti Baby Hoax, among uncountable other hoaxes and false flags. 

Within hours, a pair of U.S. Navy destroyers launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles (at a cost of some $1.5 million each, which equals $855,000,000 of scarce taxpayer dollars in one pop, to the delight of some weapons manufacturer or other), targeting aircraft, hardened shelters, fuel storage, munitions supply, air defense and communications facilities at the Al Shayrat air base, located in central Syria. Only 20% of the air base was disabled.

This space reserved for the true story, if we Americans are ever allowed to hear it.

Parts of this article relies on information from Scott Ritter’s April 9, 2017 Huffington Post article entitled “Wag The Dog — How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media”. Readers can access it by googling “Scott Ritter is Not Buying It”.

Links for this story can be found 
on-line at: readerduluth.com