US military brass select the scapegoats for Iran capture

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

So the US Navy brass has disciplined or plans to discipline 6 officers and three enlisted men for falling in to the hands of Iranians in the Persian Gulf.  The people who make the rules and direct the operations from the------ operations room------- say the sailors showed weak leadership, poor judgment and a lack of “warfighting toughness.”.

The Pentagon, that paragon of truth and transparency announced this today.

Forward he cried from the rear and the front rank died
And the general sat
And the lines on the map moved from side to side *

Apparently, these sailors are a bunch of inept bums. The real issue is they embarrassed the generals, or admirals in this instance I guess. Never mind that Iran is not at war with the United States, has never invaded the United States and has not and cannot be a serious threat to the United States. At least not if when talk about the United States we are talking about the democratic rights and security of its workers and not the faceless characters that own Chevron, Haliburton and other US corporations that plunder the natural resources of the region.

Americans who have any sense at all would benefit from publicly severing any ties whatsoever with the people that run this country, its war machinery and its media. They do not speak for us. This wouldn’t make you unpatriotic, un-American or pro Mullah.

What unmitigated arrogance these people have and the rest of the world know it. It’s a credit to the American population that earn their living from honest labor as opposed to speculation and ownership of defense or energy industry shares, that we are still quite popular with many workers throughout the world who have the sense to separate us from our government and the thugs that run it.

In the military one loses the right to think critically or question. Nothing is worse than thinking independently. The orchestrators of US war policy are well aware of the revolts in the military that contributed so much to the defeat in Vietnam. They remember the killing of officers, the refusal to fight, and that at some time those workers in uniform break through the mind control and lies and act on the realization that these conflicts are not to defend America and our livelihoods that are under constant assault at home, but they are conflicts to defend corporate profits. They are assaults on weaker former colonial countries by the most powerful military in history.

The sailors were "derelict in performing their duties,", the report states.  After straying in to Iranian waters and falling in to Iranian hands they allowed themselves to be videotaped while eating food offered them by Iranians. One traitor even encouraged his fellow sailors to eat food. Another sailor made, "statements adverse to U.S. interests", the report states.

The boat crews made a mistake by entering Iranian waters, the report states but the Iranians violated international law by impeding the boats’ “innocent passage” violating the US sovereign immunity by boarding and seizing the boats.

Remember, this is in a place 10,000 or so miles from where I am in California called the Persian Gulf.  It is called the Persian Gulf because it is next to Persia, for Americans, that is the former name of Iran. The US surrounds both the country of Iran and the waterways with weapons of mass destruction. The US orchestrated the coup in 1953 that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected secular government that decided to nationalize its oil industry and wrest it from British/western control.

No crewmember was harmed the Navy report says, but, and please don’t laugh at this one, “Interrogators employed intimidation tactics such as slapping the table, spinning the captive's chair, or threatening to move them to the Iranian mainland."  Gasp!

It is in the interests of the US working class to condemn this arrogant and hypocritical statement unconditionally. The CIA has been kidnapping people throughout the world without any justification in most cases, drugging them, flying them to various torture centers and in one case of mistaken identity returning the guy to a mountain top in Albania and dumping him, perhaps after sticking a few objects up his rectum which is a common practice.

At the behest of the US three British Muslims who went back to Pakistan for a wedding and took a trip across the border to Afghanistan like we would to Canada or Mexico, were rounded up by US allies along with thousands of others and after the usual drugging and some torture on foreign soil were sent to Guantanamo for years where they received more of the same.  See The Road to Guantanamo.  Or check in to cases like Majid Khan. Kahn, “,,,,who once lived in Maryland and is currently at Guántanamo Bay, was rectally inserted with a pureed cocktail of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins. Another detainee subjected to the procedure, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, experienced chronic hemmorhoids, an anal fissure and a “symptomatic rectal prolapse.” Medical officials, impressed with the “ancillary” effectiveness of the technique, were found to view rectal rehydration not as a medical treatment but “a means of behavior control.” Guardian UK Dec.9^th 2014

Want to find out the source of ISIS, the source of anti-American attitudes and terrorist groupings? Try not ignoring what the US military does abroad anymore, especially the CIA, perhaps the most efficient terrorist organization that’s ever been formed.

The US capitalist class cares not one IOTA about national sovereignty. It has a policy of preemptive war. Even if it thinks a person or persons in countries it has invaded and/or destroyed, is thinking about attacking the US, is talking about it, it can and does take them out. That’s what Obama does when he gets together with the generals and CIA brass once a week to discuss who should be assassinated.

Source

Remember the drone operators that wrote an open letter to Obama? You can read their letter here.  They have disappeared from the media. They too are traitors I suppose, inept, cowards, violating their codes that are written by the ruling class in order to defend the ruling class and its interests.  They spoke of the term drone operators used for children that appeared as small shadows on their screens as,“fun-sized terrorists” One of the drone operators described his routine sitting in front of a computer screen, “We waited for those men to settle down in their beds and then we killed them in their sleep. That was cowardly murder,” he said in an interview.  Where is the public support for them?

Where are the damn union officials who should be organizing meetings throughout the nation where they can speak and appeal for support and an end to a US foreign policy that murders people and makes us hated abroad, that gives Americans a bad name. No wonder veterans commit suicide at an alarming rate. If your a normal human being sent to kill people who appear as no threat to you whatsoever, you eventually become sickened, dehumanized and at some point the only escape is death.

Chelsea Manning is serving 35 years for letting the American people see this. Thank you Chelsea Manning.  Edward Snowden is in exile, Julian Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. These people are heroes.

And hundreds of thousands of Americans and incarcerated in the US gulag, a staggering percentage of them people of color, workers, youth, the poor, all abandoned by the system we call capitalism.

So in the Iranian case, the US top brass have chosen those that will pay for embarrassing them; they let themselves be fed on film by Iranians. What they did has “raised questions about the Navy's preparedness in a waterway known to pose risks amid tensions between the U.S. and Iran.”, the brass says trying to repeatedly to use the term “gulf” or “waterway” to avoid the term “Persian Gulf” which is where they are.

I don’t believe anything the Pentagon says.

*Lyrics from Us and Them Pink Floyd