U.S. warmongering continues to drain the budget

At Huffpo, Jeff Cohen writes:

Today there's an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don't. It's arguably our country's biggest problem -- a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War). That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war. In 1967, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" -- and said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." . . . What our mainstream media so obediently call the "War on Terror" is experienced in other countries as a U.S. war of terror -- kidnappings, night raids, torture, drone strikes, killing and maiming of innocent civilians -- that creates new enemies for our country.

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The mainstream media attack on Martin Luther King for his criticism of warmongering

Here is a basic rule of American journalism: Don't speak the truth during times of war. Martin Luther King received received harsh treatment by the mainstream media when he dared to speak out about the Vietnam War, even after his many successes in the area of civil rights. The occasion was King's somber Riverside Church speech. Part II of King's speech is here.   King's speech is accurately described as follows at this Youtube page:

By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.
At the recently concluded National Conference for Media Reform, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now commented on the propensity of the media to become obeisant to warmongering American politicians, and the equal propensity of the media to criticize those who criticize warmongering. To hear Goodman's excellent speech, go to minute 28:00 of the composite video.

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Invisible war victims

Glenn Greenwald writes the following as part of his article on an upcoming film titled "Dirty Wars."

The most propagandistic aspect of the US War on Terror has been, and remains, that its victims are rendered invisible and voiceless. They are almost never named by newspapers. They and their surviving family members are virtually never heard from on television. The Bush and Obama DOJs have collaborated with federal judges to ensure that even those who everyone admits are completely innocent have no access to American courts and thus no means of having their stories heard or their rights vindicated. Radical secrecy theories and escalating attacks on whistleblowers push these victims further into the dark. It is the ultimate tactic of Othering: concealing their humanity, enabling their dehumanization, by simply relegating them to nonexistence.
The following excerpt is from the website of "Dirty Wars."
As [Investigative Reporter] Scahill digs deeper into the activities of JSOC, he is pulled into a world of covert operations unknown to the public and carried out across the globe by men who do not exist on paper and will never appear before Congress. In military jargon, JSOC teams “find, fix, and finish” their targets, who are selected through a secret process. No target is off limits for the “kill list,” including U.S. citizens. Drawn into the stories and lives of the people he meets along the way, Scahill is forced to confront the painful consequences of a war spinning out of control, as well as his own role as a journalist.

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The Iraq war goes on

As Kathy Kelly explains, the Iraq War is not over:

Effects go on immeasurably and indefensibly. Effects of war continue for the 2.2 million people who’ve been displaced by bombing and chaos, whose livelihoods are irreparably destroyed, and who’ve become refugees in other countries, separated from loved ones and unlikely to ever reclaim the homes and communities from which they had to flee hastily. Within Iraq, an estimated 2.8 million internally displaced people live, according to Refugees International, “in constant fear, with limited access to shelter, food, and basic services.” The war hasn’t ended for people who are survivors of torture or for those who were following orders by becoming torturers. Nor has it ended for the multiple generations of U.S. taxpayers who will continue paying for a war which economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz have so far priced at $4 trillion. For Bradley Manning, whose brave empathy exposed criminal actions on the part of U.S. warlords complicit in torture, death squads and executions, the war most certainly isn’t over. He lives as an isolated war hero and whistleblower, facing decades or perhaps life in prison. The war may never end for veterans who harbor physical and emotional wounds that will last until they die.
-- Amy Goodman of Democracy Now also added up some of the costs of the Iraq adventure:
On the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we look at a massive new report by a team of 30 economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts and physicians about the Iraq War’s impact. "The Costs of War" report found the total number of people who have died from the Iraq War, including soldiers, militants, police, contractors, journalists, humanitarian workers and Iraqi civilians, has reached at least 189,000 people, including at least 123,000 civilians. Financially, the report estimates a cost to U.S. taxpayers of $2.2 trillion, a figure that could one day approach $4 trillion with the interest accrued on the borrowed money used to fund the war.

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