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> There's a part of the American character that is deeply concerned > with the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is > no greater or clearer manifestation of unrestrained power than > assuming for oneself the authority to execute an individual outside > of a battlefield context and without the involvement of any sort of > judicial process. > > Unrestrained power may be many things, but it’s not American. It is > in this sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become > an act of political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and > lifts the lamp, inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that > begins with Paul Revere. > ___ > Edward Snowden, May 3, 2016

>https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03/edward-snowden-whistleblowing-is-not-just-leaking-its-an-act-of-political-resistance/ >

Specifically on Iran, which is really important for understanding the rest of it, there’s Gareth Porter’s Manufactured Crisis:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1935982338/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_TQa2FbCS2DTBY

>
> The most widely recognized case of blowback was provoked by Bremer's first major act, the firing of approximately 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers. >
> "De-Baathification," it was called. >
> That mistake had three concrete effects: it damaged the possibility of reconstruction by removing skilled people from their posts, it weakened the voice of secular Iraqis, and it fed the resistance with angry people. Dozens of senior U.S. military and intelligence officers have acknowledged that many of the 400,000 soldiers Bremer laid off went straight to the emerging resistance. As Marine Colonel Thomas Hammes put it, "Now you have a couple hundred thousand people who are armed – because they took their weapons home with them – who know how to use the weapons, who have no future, who have a reason to be angry at you." >
> – from Chapter 17 (Ideological Blowback)
> The Shock Doctrine:The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein, 2007 >

One good thing about Mattis is he is anti-torture and apparently successful at convincing Trump to lean that way

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/us/politics/donald-trump-visit.html?_r=0

>On the issue of torture, Mr. Trump suggested he had changed his mind about the value of waterboarding after talking with James N. Mattis

>‘Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I’ll do better.' “I was very impressed by that answer,” Mr. Trump said.

For further reading: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/us/politics/james-mattis-defense-secretary-trump.html

This helps explain a lot

Zbigniew Brzezinski - advising US presidents since the 70's, god help us all.

It's a no-brainer that the US only used the atomic bombs to test them and to intimidate the Russians:

> "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge, any illusions on my part, but that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was carried out on that basis." -- US Army General Leslie Groves, the director of the WWII Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb

The only thing that keeps the idea that we dropped the bombs "to end the war" is US propaganda and nationalistic indoctrination.

But is it too politically incorrect to deal with the fact that the US deliberately sought to provoke Japan into attacking the US?

WWII vet, journalist and researcher Robert Stinnett has researched Pearl Harbor for decades, amassing much evidence -- everything from first-hand testimony from WWII vets to a Freedom of Information Act-uncovered US gov't document which outlined 8 steps the US needed take to provoke Japan into attacking the US.

The reason for the US wanting Japan to attack is simple.

After France fell so quickly the Roosevelt administration (and the world) was shocked! So the US sought to enter the war against Germany through the "back door" -- the German-Japanese alliance. Thus, the US carried out each of those 8 steps, as Stinnett details in his book "Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor"

> "Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war." -- Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, 1944.

n his 2015 book Kill Chain: The Rise Of The High-Tech Assassins, Andrew Cockburn describes how, if US surveillance suspects the presence of a "High Value Target" in a public place, regardless of restrictions that on the number of innocents who can be murdered as “collateral damage," the Americans bomb the site and kill everyone there. He describes an instance where the US assassinated an underling of a "High Value Target" based on the mere assumption that the man would attend a funeral. The funeral was obliterated from the air though it was not known if the "High Value Target" was actually there. Every "military-age" male within the strike zone is automatically counted among the "hostile combatants."

They do these things knowing that innocent civilians will die; it is considered an acceptable, if unfortunate, price to pay.

That is, of course, not morally different from terrorists who explode suicide bombs in public places; considering the means to be justified by the ends.

Actually, the suicide bomber takes a risk infinitely greater than that of a drone pilot; and doesn't deserve the appellation of coward. Killing by robots, from a safe place several thousand miles away, is the very definition of cowardice.

And America's wars are not only morally indefensible; they are the most cowardly in human history.