Castigating Trump For Truth-Telling

Castigating Trump For Truth-Telling

By Robert Parry
Consortiumnews.com
February 7, 2017

Gaining acceptance in Official Washington is a lot like getting
admittance into a secret society’s inner sanctum by uttering
some nonsensical password.

In Washington to show you belong, you must express views that
are patently untrue or blatantly hypocritical.

For instance, you might be called upon to say that, “Iran is the
principal source of terrorism” when that title clearly belongs to
Saudi Arabia and other Gulf state allies that have funded Al Qaeda,
the Taliban and the Islamic State.

But truth has no particularly value in Official Washington;
adherence to, “group think” is what’s important.

Similarly you might have to deny any, “moral equivalence” between
killings attributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin and killings
authorized by U.S. presidents.

In this context, the fact that the urbane Barack Obama scheduled
time one day a week to check off people for targeted assassinations
isn’t relevant.

Nor is the reality that Donald Trump has joined this elite club of
official killers by approving a botched and bloody raid in Yemen
that slaughtered a number of women and children (and left one
U.S. soldier dead, too).

You have to understand that, “our killings” are always good or at
least justifiable (innocent mistakes do happen from time to time),
but Russian killings are always bad.

Indeed, Official Washington has so demonized Putin that any
untoward death in Russia can be blamed on him whether there
is any evidence or not.

To suggest that evidence is needed shows that you must be a,
“Moscow stooge.”

To violate these inviolable norms of Official Washington, in which
participants must intuitively grasp the value of such “group think”
and the truism of, “American exceptionalism” marks you as a
dangerous outsider who must be marginalized or broken.

Currently, President Trump is experiencing this official opprobrium
as he is widely denounced by Republicans, Democrats and, “news”
people because he didn’t react properly to a question from Fox
News’ Bill O’Reilly terming Putin, “a killer.”

“There are a lot of killers.” Trump responded. “We’ve got a lot of
killers. What do you think — our country’s so innocent. You think
our country’s so innocent?”

Aghast at Trump’s heresy, O’Reilly sputtered, “I don’t know of any
government leaders that are killers.”

Trump: “Well — take a look at what we’ve done too. We made a lot
of mistakes. I’ve been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.”

O’Reilly: “But mistakes are different than —“

Trump: “A lot of mistakes, but a lot of people were killed.
A lot of killers around, believe me.”

‘Moral Equivalence’

Though Trump is justly criticized for often making claims that
aren’t true, here he was saying something that clearly was true.

But it has drawn fierce condemnation from across Official
Washington, not only from Democrats but from Trump’s fellow
Republicans, too.

Neoconservative Washington Post opinion writer Charles
Krauthammer objected fiercely to Trump’s, “moral equivalence”
and CNN’s Anderson Cooper chimed in, lamenting Trump’s deviation
into, “equivalence” i.e. holding the U.S. government to the same
ethical standards as the Russian government.

This, “moral equivalence” argument has been with us at least since
the Reagan administration when human rights groups objected to
President Reagan’s support for right-wing governments in Central
America that engaged in, “death squad” tactics against political
dissidents, including the murders of priests and nuns and genocide
against disaffected Indian tribes.

To suggest that Reagan and his friends should be subjected to
the same standards that he applied to left-wing authoritarian
governments earned you the accusation of, “moral equivalence.”

Declassified documents from Reagan’s White House show that this
P.R. strategy was refined at National Security Council meetings led
by U.S. intelligence propaganda experts.

Now the, “moral equivalence” theme is being revived to discredit
a new Republican president who dares challenge this particular
Official Washington, “group think.”

Lots of Killing

The unpleasant truth is that all leaders of major countries
and many leaders of smaller countries are, “killers.”

President Obama admitted that he had ordered military strikes
in seven different countries to kill people.

His Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejoiced over the grisly
murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi with a clever twist
on a famous Julius Caesar boast of conquest: “We came, we saw,
he died,” Clinton chirped.

At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George
W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial
assault on Baghdad, known as, “shock and awe.”

President George W. Bush launched an illegal war against Iraq
based on false pretenses, causing the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis, many of them children and other civilians.

President Bill Clinton ordered a vicious bombing campaign
against the Serbian capital of Belgrade, which included
intentionally targeting the Serb TV building and killing 16
civilian employees because Clinton considered the station’s
news reports to be, “propaganda” i.e., not in line with U.S.
propaganda.

After the U.S. bombing in 1991 that incinerated more than
400 civilians, the Amiriyah Bunker in Baghdad was turned
into a memorial to the victims.

Since the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003,
the memorial was closed to the public.

President George H.W. Bush slaughtered scores of Panamanians
who happened to live near the headquarters of the Panamanian
Defense Forces and he killed tens of thousands of Iraqis,
including incinerating a civilian bomb shelter in Baghdad,
after he brushed aside proposals for resolving Iraq’s invasion
of Kuwait peacefully.

Bush wanted a successful war as a way to rally the American
people behind future foreign military operations, so, in his
words, the country could kick “the Vietnam Syndrome once
and for all."

Other U.S. presidents have had more or less blood on their hands
than these recent chief executives, but it is hard to identify any
modern U.S. president who has not been a, “killer” in some form,
inflicting death upon innocents whether as part of some,
“justifiable” mission or not.

But the mainstream U.S. press corps routinely adopts double
standards when assessing acts by a U.S. president and those
of an, “enemy.”

When the U.S. kills people, the mainstream media bends over
backwards to rationalize the violence, but does the opposite if
the killing is authorized by some demonized foreign leader.

That is now the case with Putin.

Any accusation against Putin – no matter how lacking in evidence
– is treated as credible and any evidence of Putin’s innocence is
ridiculed or suppressed.

That was the case with a documentary that debunked claims that
hedge fund accountant Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in a Russian
prison because he was a whistleblower when the documentary
showed that he was a suspect in a massive money-laundering
scheme and died of natural causes.

Although produced by a documentarian who started out planning to
do a sympathetic portrayal of Magnitsky, the facts led in a different
direction that caused the documentary to be shunned by the
European Union and given minimal distribution in the United States.

By contrast, the ease with which Putin is called a murderer –
based on, “mysterious deaths” inside Russia – is reminiscent
of how American right-wing groups suggested that Bill and
Hillary Clinton were murderers by distributing a long list of,
“mysterious deaths” somehow related to the Clinton, “scandals”
from their Arkansas days.

While there was no specific evidence connecting the Clinton's to
any of these deaths, the sheer number created suspicions that
were hard to knock down without making you a “Clinton apologist.”

Similarly, a demand for actual evidence proving Putin’s guilt
in a specific case makes you a, “Putin apologist.”

However, as a leader of a powerful nation facing threats from
terrorism and other national security dangers, Putin is surely a,
“killer” much as U.S. presidents are killers.

That appears to have been President Trump’s point, that the
United States doesn’t have clean hands when it comes to
shedding innocent blood.

But telling such an unpleasant albeit obvious truth is not the way to
gain entrance into the inner sanctum of Official Washington’s Deep
State.

The passwords for admission require you to say a lot of things that
are patently false.

Any inconvenient truth-telling earns you the bum’s rush out into the
alley, even if you’re President of the United States.

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/07/castigating-trump-for-
truth-telling