Simple fucking stuff: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Or: “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”
Aug 16, 2026
2006 — Nearly 18 months after an uproar erupted over a professor who likened some Sept. 11 victims to Nazis, the University of Colorado on Monday took its biggest step yet toward firing him.
The highest-ranking official at Colorado’s main campus called on the university to dismiss ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill for “a pattern of research misconduct committed over a period of time.”
Churchill did not immediately return telephone messages but has denied the allegations and dismissed the university’s investigation as a pretense to fire him. His attorney, David Lane, said Churchill will appeal and, if he loses, he will sue.
“I trust juries to make these decisions, not bureaucrats,” he said.
Churchill’s comparison of Sept. 11 victims to Nazis ultimately led to his speech being canceled at Eastern Washington University in April 2005. But he appeared on the Cheney campus anyway and drew 500 mostly enthusiastic spectators at an outdoor rally. He also addressed a class.
I was there, talked with Ward, and of course the journalists and fucking faculty I was associated with stated that Ward was bad mojo. Ward is gone now. I, of course, pushed back on Ward’s terrorists thesis around 9/11.
I would have liked to bring Ward to a campus in Spokane or out in Washington or Oregon, speaking about this great man’s questioning of the 9/11 narrative:
Filmed during the final year of his life, Dr. Graeme MacQueen reflects on his personal transformation from peace activist and academic to 9/11 researcher. As he revisits his involvement in the global peace movement and the controversial questions he raised about the events of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, MacQueen delivers a final message about truth, war, and the power of asking hard questions—even when they challenge the official narrative.
Peace, War, and 9/11 (2023) is a compelling documentary that centers on the late Dr. Graeme MacQueen, a Canadian peace scholar, author, and one of the most respected voices in the 9/11 truth movement. Filmed shortly before his passing in 2023, the documentary serves as both a reflection on his life’s work and a thought-provoking examination of the events surrounding September 11, 2001.
Dr. MacQueen—who held a Ph.D. in comparative religion from Harvard and taught religious studies at McMaster University for 30 years—was known for his deep commitment to nonviolence and his rigorous critique of official war narratives. He was the founding director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster, where he also played a key role in peace-building initiatives in war-torn regions like Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.
Peace, War, and 9/11 combines his final in-depth interview with archival footage, personal reflections, and commentary from colleagues and researchers. The film challenges viewers to reconsider the implications of 9/11 on global policy, civil liberties, and the peace movement.
Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
The Politics of a Perpetrator Population
About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau
On Matters of Proportion and Intent
When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously — and quite charitably, all things considered — replied that it was merely a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens — along with some half-million dead Iraqi children — came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.
The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable — in fact, widely predicted — result of the 1991 US “surgical” bombing of their country’s water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other “infrastructural” targets upon which Iraq’s civilian population depends for its very survival. [See The Secret Behind the Sanctions — How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq’s Water Supply, by Thomas J. Nagy, The Progressive, September 2001.]
If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough — and it should be noted that this sort of “aerial warfare” constitutes a Class I Crime Against Humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of “civilized” behavior [See Sanctions and War on Iraq: In 300 words, by Citizens Concerned for the People of Iraq, 17 Aug 2002] — the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now [See Iraq Sanctions: Humanitarian Implications and Options for the Future, marking the 12th anniversary of sanctions on Iraq, 8/6/02, and the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, a registered society at the University of Cambridge, England]. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims’ ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to save the lives of even their toddlers.
All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered — are still suffering — a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.
The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st “freedom-loving” father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: “The world must learn that what we say goes,” intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere.
How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.
In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 “towel-heads” and “camel jockeys” — or was it “sand niggers” that week? — in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance. It was a performance worthy of the Nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany’s “innocent civilians” until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943. [See They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–1945, by Milton Mayer (University of Chicago Press: 1966)]
There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed — nay, empowered — their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.
If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was truly ghastly.
Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo — continued bull force by Bush the Elder’s successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of its “resolve” to finalize what George himself had dubbed the “New World Order” of American military/economic domination — it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.
One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, repeatedly denounced what was happening as “a systematic program … of deliberate genocide.” His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was “unaware” of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halliday’s assessment. Asked during the widely viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his “allegations,” she calmly announced that she’d decided it was “worth the price” to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.
The Politics of a Perpetrator Population
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns. There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting “Jeremy” and “Ellington” to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little “Tiffany” and “Ashley” had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays — for “our kids,” no less — as an all-absorbing point of political focus.
In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved, by and large, contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing “moral witness” as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.
Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the “resistance” expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically useful task of trying to ensure, as “a principle of moral virtue,” that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of “challenging” the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these “dissidents,” in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory “violence” as having their windows broken by persons less “enlightened” — or perhaps more outraged — than the self-anointed “peacekeepers.”
Property before people, it seems — or at least the equation of property to people — is a value by no means restricted to America’s boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone “pacifists” queuing up to condemn the black bloc after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.
Small wonder, all in all, that people elsewhere in the world — the Mideast, for instance — began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America’s purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.
The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption. So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America’s free-fire zones.
Tellingly, it was at precisely this point — with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it — that the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United States.
Meet the “Terrorists”
Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate “news” media immediately following their successful operation on September 11.
They did not, for starters, “initiate” a war with the US, much less commit “the first acts of war of the new millennium.”
A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the “Christian West” — now proudly emblematized by the United States — against the “Islamic East” since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago.
More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel’s dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered “Desert Shield” in 1990, or at any of several points in between.
Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war — and they can — then the same is true of every US “overflight” of Iraqi territory since day one.
The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course.
That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint. They did not license themselves to “target innocent civilians.”
There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center.
Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved –, and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” – a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind, and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.
The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not “cowards.” That distinction properly belongs to the “firm-jawed lads” who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough to be below – including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians – while themselves incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the word describes all those “fighting men and women” who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September 11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining their objectives.
Nor were they “fanatics” devoted to “Islamic fundamentalism.”
One might rightly describe their actions as “desperate.” Feelings of desperation, however, are a perfectly reasonable – one is tempted to say “normal” – emotional response among persons confronted by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid them, a Gypsy).
That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle, of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI’s investigative reports on the combat teams’ activities during the months leading up to September 11 make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it’s pretty obvious at this point that they were secular activists – soldiers, really – who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.
And still less were they/their acts “insane.”
Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one – or one’s country – holds what amounts to a “divine right” to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting in some material way to bring the process to a halt. Sanity itself, in this frame of reference, might be defined by a willingness to try and destroy the perpetrators and/or the sources of their ability to commit their crimes. (Shall we now discuss the US “strategic bombing campaign” against Germany during World War II, and the mental health of those involved in it?)
Which takes us to official characterizations of the combat teams as an embodiment of “evil.”
Evil – for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept – was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she’d imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq. Evil was to be heard in that great American hero “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf’s utterly dehumanizing dismissal of their systematic torture and annihilation as mere “collateral damage.” Evil, moreover, is a term appropriate to describing the mentality of a public that finds such perspectives and the policies attending them acceptable, or even momentarily tolerable.
Had it not been for these evils, the counterattacks of September 11 would never have occurred. And unless “the world is rid of such evil,” to lift a line from George Junior, September 11 may well end up looking like a lark.
There is no reason, after all, to believe that the teams deployed in the assaults on the WTC and the Pentagon were the only such, that the others are composed of “Arabic-looking individuals” – America’s indiscriminately lethal arrogance and psychotic sense of self-entitlement have long since given the great majority of the world’s peoples ample cause to be at war with it – or that they are in any way dependent upon the seizure of civilian airliners to complete their missions.
To the contrary, there is every reason to expect that there are many other teams in place, tasked to employ altogether different tactics in executing operational plans at least as well-crafted as those evident on September 11, and very well equipped for their jobs. This is to say that, since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were acts of war – not “terrorist incidents” – they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results. From this, it can only be adduced that there are plenty of other components ready to go, and that they will be used, should this become necessary in the eyes of the strategists. It also seems a safe bet that each component is calibrated to inflict damage at a level incrementally higher than the one before (during the 1960s, the Johnson administration employed a similar policy against Vietnam, referred to as “escalation”).
Since implementation of the overall plan began with the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it takes no rocket scientist to decipher what is likely to happen next, should the U.S. attempt a response of the inexcusable variety to which it has long entitled itself.
About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau
There’s another matter begging for comment at this point. The idea that the FBI’s “counterterrorism task forces” can do a thing to prevent what will happen is yet another dimension of America’s delusional pathology.. The fact is that, for all its publicly-financed “image-building” exercises, the Bureau has never shown the least aptitude for anything of the sort.
Oh, yeah, FBI counterintelligence personnel have proven quite adept at framing anarchists, communists and Black Panthers, sometimes murdering them in their beds or the electric chair. The Bureau’s SWAT units have displayed their ability to combat child abuse in Waco by burning babies alive, and its vaunted Crime Lab has been shown to pad its “crime-fighting’ statistics by fabricating evidence against many an alleged car thief. But actual “heavy-duty bad guys” of the sort at issue now? This isn’t a Bruce Willis/Chuck Norris/Sly Stallone movie, after all.. And J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t get to approve either the script or the casting.
The number of spies, saboteurs and bona fide terrorists apprehended, or even detected by the FBI in the course of its long and slimy history could be counted on one’s fingers and toes. On occasion, its agents have even turned out to be the spies, and, in many instances, the terrorists as well.
To be fair once again, if the Bureau functions as at best a carnival of clowns where its “domestic security responsibilities” are concerned, this is because – regardless of official hype – it has none. It is now, as it’s always been, the national political police force, and instrument created and perfected to ensure that all Americans, not just the consenting mass, are “free” to do exactly as they’re told.
The FBI and “cooperating agencies” can thus be relied upon to set about “protecting freedom” by destroying whatever rights and liberties were left to U.S. citizens before September 11 (in fact, they’ve already received authorization to begin). Sheeplike, the great majority of Americans can also be counted upon to bleat their approval, at least in the short run, believing as they always do that the nasty implications of what they’re doing will pertain only to others.
Oh Yeah, and “The Company,” Too
A possibly even sicker joke is the notion, suddenly in vogue, that the CIA will be able to pinpoint “terrorist threats,” “rooting out their infrastructure” where it exists and/or “terminating” it before it can materialize, if only it’s allowed to beef up its “human intelligence gathering capacity” in an unrestrained manner (including full-bore operations inside the US, of course).
Yeah. Right.
Since America has a collective attention span of about 15 minutes, a little refresher seems in order: “The Company” had something like a quarter-million people serving as “intelligence assets” by feeding it information in Vietnam in 1968, and it couldn’t even predict the Tet Offensive. God knows how many spies it was fielding against the USSR at the height of Ronald Reagan’s version of the Cold War, and it was still caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. As to destroying “terrorist infrastructures,” one would do well to remember Operation Phoenix, another product of its open season in Vietnam. In that one, the CIA enlisted elite US units like the Navy Seals and Army Special Forces, as well as those of friendly countries – the South Vietnamese Rangers, for example, and Australian SAS – to run around “neutralizing” folks targeted by The Company’s legion of snitches as “guerrillas” (as those now known as “terrorists” were then called).
Sound familiar?
Upwards of 40,000 people – mostly bystanders, as it turns out – were murdered by Phoenix hit teams before the guerrillas, stronger than ever, ran the US and its collaborators out of their country altogether. And these are the guys who are gonna save the day, if unleashed to do their thing in North America?
The net impact of all this “counterterrorism” activity upon the combat teams’ ability to do what they came to do, of course, will be nil.
Instead, it’s likely to make it easier for them to operate (it’s worked that way in places like Northern Ireland). And, since denying Americans the luxury of reaping the benefits of genocide in comfort was self-evidently a key objective of the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it can be stated unequivocally that a more overt display of the police state mentality already pervading this country simply confirms the magnitude of their victory.
On Matters of Proportion and Intent
As things stand, including the 1993 detonation at the WTC, “Arab terrorists” have responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq with a total of four assaults by explosives inside the US. That’s about 1% of the 50,000 bombs the Pentagon announced were rained on Baghdad alone during the Gulf War (add in Oklahoma City, and you’ll get something nearer an actual 1%).
They’ve managed in the process to kill about 5,000 Americans, or roughly 1% of the dead Iraqi children (the percentage is far smaller if you factor in the killing of adult Iraqi civilians, not to mention troops butchered as/after they’d surrendered and/or after the “war-ending” ceasefire had been announced).
In terms undoubtedly more meaningful to the property/profit-minded American mainstream, they’ve knocked down a half-dozen buildings – albeit some very well-chosen ones – as opposed to the “strategic devastation” visited upon the whole of Iraq, and punched a $100 billion hole in the earnings outlook of major corporate shareholders, as opposed to the U.S. obliteration of Iraq’s entire economy.
With that, they’ve given Americans a tiny dose of their own medicine.. This might be seen as merely a matter of “vengeance” or “retribution,” and, unquestionably, America has earned it, even if it were to add up only to something so ultimately petty.
The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations, killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.
Were this the intent of those who’ve entered the US to wage war against it, it would remain no less true that America and Americans were only receiving the bill for what they’d already done. Payback, as they say, can be a real motherfucker (ask the Germans). There is, however, no reason to believe that retributive parity is necessarily an item on the agenda of those who planned the WTC/Pentagon operation. If it were, given the virtual certainty that they possessed the capacity to have inflicted far more damage than they did, there would be a lot more American bodies lying about right now.
Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the “news” media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast “aren’t like” Americans, not least because they don’t “value life’ in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life – all lives, not just their own – far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.
The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy
In sum, one can discern a certain optimism – it might even be called humanitarianism – embedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.
Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name – indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it – mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
Now they do.
That was the “medicinal” aspect of the attacks.
To all appearances, the idea is now to give the tonic a little time to take effect, jolting Americans into the realization that the sort of pain they’re now experiencing first-hand is no different from – or the least bit more excruciating than – that which they’ve been so cavalier in causing others, and thus to respond appropriately.
More bluntly, the hope was – and maybe still is – that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as “stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe.”
Either way, it’s a kind of “reality therapy” approach, designed to afford the American people a chance to finally “do the right thing” on their own, without further coaxing.
Were the opportunity acted upon in some reasonably good faith fashion – a sufficiently large number of Americans rising up and doing whatever is necessary to force an immediate lifting of the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, or maybe hanging a few of America’s abundant supply of major war criminals (Henry Kissinger comes quickly to mind, as do Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and George the Elder) – there is every reason to expect that military operations against the US on its domestic front would be immediately suspended.
Whether they would remain so would of course be contingent upon follow-up. By that, it may be assumed that American acceptance of onsite inspections by international observers to verify destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (as well as dismantlement of all facilities in which more might be manufactured), Nuremberg-style trials in which a few thousand US military/corporate personnel could be properly adjudicated and punished for their Crimes Against humanity, and payment of reparations to the array of nations/peoples whose assets the US has plundered over the years, would suffice.
Since they’ve shown no sign of being unreasonable or vindictive, it may even be anticipated that, after a suitable period of adjustment and reeducation (mainly to allow them to acquire the skills necessary to living within their means), those restored to control over their own destinies by the gallant sacrifices of the combat teams the WTC and Pentagon will eventually (re)admit Americans to the global circle of civilized societies. Stranger things have happened.
In the Alternative
Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case. Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations’ worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US. Then, again, it’s entirely possible they were aware that a decisive majority of American adults have been reduced by this point to a level much closer to the kind of immediate self-gratification entailed in Pavlovian stimulus/response patterns than anything accessible by appeals to higher logic, and still felt morally obliged to offer the dolts an option to quit while they were ahead.
What the hell? It was worth a try.
But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the dosage of medicine administered was entirely insufficient to accomplish its purpose.
Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, Americans for the most part still don’t get it.
Already, they’ve desecrated the temporary tomb of those killed in the WTC, staging a veritable pep rally atop the mangled remains of those they profess to honor, treating the whole affair as if it were some bizarre breed of contact sport. And, of course, there are the inevitable pom-poms shaped like American flags, the school colors worn as little red-white-and-blue ribbons affixed to labels, sportscasters in the form of “counterterrorism experts” drooling mindless color commentary during the pregame warm-up.
Refusing the realization that the world has suddenly shifted its axis, and that they are therefore no longer “in charge,” they have, by and large, reverted instantly to type, working themselves into their usual bloodlust on the now obsolete premise that the bloodletting will “naturally” occur elsewhere and to someone else.
“Patriotism,” a wise man once observed, “is the last refuge of scoundrels.”
And the braided, he might have added.
Braided Scoundrel-in-Chief, George Junior, lacking even the sense to be careful what he wished for, has teamed up with a gaggle of fundamentalist Christian clerics like Billy Graham to proclaim a “New Crusade” called “Infinite Justice” aimed at “ridding the world of evil.”
One could easily make light of such rhetoric, remarking upon how unseemly it is for a son to threaten his father in such fashion – or a president to so publicly contemplate the murder/suicide of himself and his cabinet – but the matter is deadly serious.
They are preparing once again to sally forth for the purpose of roasting brown-skinned children by the scores of thousands. Already, the B-1 bombers and the aircraft carriers and the missile frigates are en route, the airborne divisions are gearing up to go.
To where? Afghanistan?
The Sudan?
Iraq, again (or still)?
How about Grenada (that was fun)?
Any of them or all. It doesn’t matter.
The desire to pummel the helpless runs rabid as ever.
Only, this time it’s different.
The time the helpless aren’t, or at least are not so helpless as they were.
This time, somewhere, perhaps in an Afghani mountain cave, possibly in a Brooklyn basement, maybe another local altogether – but somewhere, all the same – there’s a grim-visaged (wo)man wearing a Clint Eastwood smile.
“Go ahead, punks,” s/he’s saying, “Make my day.”
And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad – or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the “terrorists”’ own schedule, and at a place of their choosing – the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here “at home.”
Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?
That, too, is their choice to make.
Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.
“You’ve got to learn, “ the line went, “that when you push people around, some people push back.”
As they should.
As they must.
And as they undoubtedly will.
There is justice in such symmetry.
That Counterpunch article is gone: Ward Churchill, RIP – CounterPunch.org
GONE!
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/16/ward-churchill-rip
So bizarre! I accessed it today, 8/16, 9 am.
Yep. I saw him in 2005.
In April 2005, controversial speaker and former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill visited the Eastern Washington University campus near Spokane (in Cheney, WA) to deliver a speech, despite initial cancellation and security concerns raised by the university’s president. Churchill and student/faculty plaintiffs also briefly filed a civil rights lawsuit against university leadership in U.S. District Court in Spokane related to the speech dispute before it was dismissed.
Background & Context
- The Controversy: The visit occurred amid a national uproar over Churchill’s essay comparing some 9/11 victims to Nazi bureaucrats.
- EWU Canceled & Re-invited: EWU President Stephen Jordan initially canceled the appearance citing security and resource limits, but the campus Academic Senate subsequently reinvited him, leading Churchill to speak on campus in April 2005. [
- Legal Action: A lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington in Spokane (Churchill et al v. Eastern Washington University Board of Trustees) was voluntarily dismissed in June 2005
Before his Eichmann line, Churchill set up his case: “They [the 9/11 terrorists] did not license themselves to ‘target innocent civilians.’”
There you have it. Churchill was making the argument that the 9/11 terrorists did not target the WTC simply to kill innocent Americans. According to him, the 9/11 attackers went after the WTC because it was a legitimate military target in an act of war.
Of course, Churchill should have clarified his position in his original essay, which was sloppy given the weight of his argument and his tone (he defended and explained himself later, which we’ll get to in a moment). Unfortunately, his vagueness aroused a plethora of reactionary attacks, both from the right and left.
Churchill should have also emboldened this “little Eichmann” argument in his original piece by pointing out that CIA offices were housed in the WTC along with a large office of the cruise missile manufacturer, Raytheon. He could have also stressed the terrorists likely attacked the WTC in hopes of inflicting a massive fracture in the US economy, the driving force behind the violent US war machine. Instead, he left his readers to sit quietly with his “little Eichmanns” reference.
Even so, Marc Cooper and many others who criticized Churchill’s statement failed to point out that nowhere in his original essay did he argue that the WTC attacks were justified. In fact, he said it was an act of war, which he detests.
Churchill wrote that “if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war — and they can — then the same is true” for the US conduct in the Middle East.
He went on to compare the terrorists to Madeline Albright, who oversaw the US-imposed UN sanctions on Iraq, which killed tens of thousands, mostly elderly and small children. “Evil for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she’d imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq.”
Does such a harsh critique of the US military actions, and Churchill’s comparison of these ventures to the WTC attacks imply that he was delighted people were killed on 9/11?
Not in the least.
In fact, Churchill argued that these were not individual acts of terror (unless you can also categorize US military activity as terror): “This is to say that since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were an act of war, not ‘terrorist incidents’ they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results.”
FACTORIES!!!! U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? Well, it didn’t at the time.
Rooted in ancient Greece, the earliest universities were single communities of “masters and students.” In 18th century Europe they were oligarchies of sorts, apart from society, serving the elite, averse to change. But a distinctly American institution emerged after President Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which gave the states federal lands to fund universities serving agriculture, industry, and the general public. American universities combined the British emphasis on undergraduate education in humanities and the German emphasis on graduate research in science, with a new emphasis on public service. The massive infusion of federal research funds during and after World War II further fueled the rise of what Kerr called the “multiversity.”
The university, he said, was no longer cloistered, but now central to society, “a prime instrument of national purpose.” Its job was to produce new knowledge, by which he meant information in all its forms. As Kerr declared, “New knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth.”
“What the railroads did for the second half of the last century, and the automobile for the first half of this century, may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth.”
Here are some paragraphs from Ward I got before Counterpunch erased Joshua Frank’s article/interview of Ward:
Now, with respect to why anyone should even care about this stuff, let me put it this way: Like it or not, the universities have become a central component in the shaping of consciousness in the U.S., and stand to become ever more so over the foreseeable future. They can either fulfill their purported social function of inculcating critical consciousness, or they can do exactly the opposite. Absent a bona fide critical consciousness among a significant portion of the population, genuinely constructive socioeconomic and political transformation is impossible. What you end with instead is the ability of frauds like Barack Obama to pass himself off as a “progressive,” and a “left” discourse dominated by people on the order of Rachel Maddow, Ed Schulz, and the Rev [Al Sharpton: JF]. Or Michael Moore, for god’s sake. The superficiality and duplicity at issue were recently manifest in the Occupy movement.
That’s where we are, and it’s a long, long way from where we need to be. Hell, it’s a long way from the point we’d managed to reach forty-odd years ago. The decline has been dramatic, and it’s occurred at an ever more rapid rate since the ’90s. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them policy-driven. The steady withdrawal of public funding from higher ed over the past several decades is a really big one, correlated as it is to the twin evils of spiraling tuition costs and the growth of institutional dependence upon corporate subsidies.
It’s worth remembering that Reagan kicked off the tuition business at U/Cal back in 1970, mainly in retaliation for student activism in Berkeley and as a means of curbing an influx of black and Latino students. Once the barrier was breached—U/Cal, like most state university systems, used to be essentially tuition-free, the premise being that an increasingly better-educated electorate was a public good—the right quickly figured out how to use the situation to ever greater advantage. For example, raising tuition rates allowed decreasing levels of state funding, and that, in turn, helped with the lowering of corporate tax rates and the rates applicable to individuals in the uppermost income brackets.
In some ways more importantly, it didn’t take them long to realize that if rising tuition rates were coupled to making a degree the entry-level requirement for most jobs that had previously required a high school diploma, young people would be forced to go to college for that purpose rather than “the pursuit of higher learning,” per se, and they’d be compelled to incur significant personal debt in the process. This has not only been rather profitable for the banks and other entities that plunged into the business of making education loans—all of them federally guaranteed, of course—it’s provided corporate America with a labor force which, since federal law has been changed to preclude the retirement of student debt through bankruptcy, increasingly exists in a condition of veritable indentured servitude. The effect has essentially been that of a pacification program directed at students and workers alike.
Among the more insidious effects within the universities themselves has been that as students have been coerced into a trajectory of ever-greater preoccupation with making themselves more marketable to potential employers, the demand for courses designed for exactly that purpose has steadily mounted while demand for courses intended to broaden general knowledge and hone critical facility has correspondingly diminished. This has positioned corporations to specify the kinds of courses—mostly managerial and technical in nature—they prefer, and, in no small part utilizing the windfalls accruing from the earlier-mentioned reductions in corporate tax rates, to increasingly offset reductions in public funding by “sponsoring” certain curricula at the expense of others, not infrequently to the point of dictating content in preferred areas while proscribing it elsewhere within recipient institutions.
Were this not enough, the process is being rationalized and facilitated by a whole slew of lavishly-funded rightwing organizations, the objective of which—although each of them casts itself as a champion of academic freedom and “excellence”—is exactly the opposite. What they’re after is the complete elimination of critical studies from the curriculum, along with ethnic studies, women’s studies, and any other field serving to extend appreciations of cultural diversity into domains beyond those taught during the “good old days” of the 1950s. And that, of course, entails purging the professoriate of what David Horowitz characterizes as “dangerous professors,” or at least making a few prominent examples in order to chill the rest.
What you end up with, if they have their way, is universities that function as little more than glorified vo-techs. This is to say that emphasis will be placed upon the imparting of certain “useful” skill-sets, along with sufficient ideological indoctrination to blunt the potential of cognitive dissonance among most students with regard to the realities of American business as usual, and perhaps a basic grounding in triumphalist interpretations of Western culture. In substance, they’re demanding that the institutions be reconfigured in their entirety along the lines of what the corporations have taken to subsidizing and, by any estimation, they’re making considerable headway. All you have to do is listen for five minutes to Obama explaining why higher education is important to get the picture. You might as well be listening to a spokesperson for right-wing “university reform” outfits like ACTA.
Churchill and I talked briefly about the dual-use universities, about Monsanto U at Washington State University’s Ag program, or Walgreens’ sponsored pharmacy programs throughout the land. DARPA and colleges. He and I anticipated the complete groveling of colleges to the war “economy” — military ag mining chemical oil banking media surveillance physics math medicine culture congressional pharma insurance finance psychological marketing anthropology COMPLEX.
The second-largest weapons manufacturer on Earth wants your middle-schooler to love math. Raytheon (rebranded RTX) has been the title sponsor of the MATHCOUNTS competition since 2009, runs its own MathMovesU program, tours a MathAlive! exhibit through Gulf monarchies that happen to be its biggest customers, and maintains a long partnership with the Girl Scouts of the USA, for whom it launched a national computer science program and wrote many of the coding badges. A new MintPress News investigation by Alan Macleod maps this ecosystem, and it is bigger and stranger than you think.
Lockheed Martin hosts CYBERQUEST, an annual high-school competition steering teenagers toward careers in intelligence and cybersecurity, and runs internship pipelines it says convert 60 percent of participants into paid company roles. A $1.5 million donation to the University of Texas at Arlington bought its name onto the campus career center. Boeing’s Engineering is Elementary program starts on children in pre-K.
BAE Systems goes furthest of all. The maker of jets, missiles, howitzers and warships has published videos of its employees and British soldiers reading Rapunzel, Cinderella and Goldilocks to small children, complete with problem-solving worksheets. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade notes BAE claims to spend as much as 100 million pounds a year on educational activities, and argues the motive is not community spirit but recruitment and reputation-laundering aimed at people too young to know what an arms company is.
Set the fairytales against the product line. The Tomahawk cruise missile that destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Iran this February, killing at least 156 people, most of them pupils, is a Raytheon product; BAE subsystems supported the strike. The laser-guided bomb that hit a school bus in Dhahyan, Yemen in 2018, killing 40 children, was traced to Lockheed Martin. Human Rights Watch found that the GBU-39s dropped on the Khadija Girls’ School in Deir al-Balah in 2024 were built by Boeing. Some 97 percent of schools in Gaza have been hit, with US military aid to Israel running to $21.7 billion in two years, per Brown University researchers.
The symmetry is the story. In America, cash-starved school systems accept the arms industry’s money and its framing: empowerment, inclusion, girls in STEM. Abroad, children experience the same companies as the manufacturers of the things that fall on their schools. One set of kids gets the branded worksheets; the other gets the payload. The scouting movement was, after all, founded by a British general explicitly worried that boys weren’t fit enough for the next war. The pipeline has simply been modernized.
Long live the power of Ward:
Kirsten Bayes from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade was unimpressed by Raytheon’s attempts to improve their image and to train the next generation of weapons manufacturers. “Our view is that arms companies have no place in schools or colleges, and should certainly not be working with children’s educational charities. Schools and other places of education should be places where children learn, grow and develop their full potential. They should not be a recruiting ground where arms companies whitewash their activities.”
CAAT condemns the US and Israel’s illegal war on Iran that began on 28th February, which is a flagrant violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter which prohibits the use of force against another state, except in self-defence or following authorisation by a UN Security Council resolution. There was no evidence of an imminent attack by Iran on either the US, Israel, or any other state, that would support a claim that this is a ‘preemptive’ attack. It is an illegal war of aggression, pure and simple.
The attacks were launched, moreover, in the middle of negotiations on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme, supposedly one of the main reasons for the attack, which were apparently making progress, but where the US was clearly negotiating in bad faith.
CAAT likewise condemns Iranian attacks against civilian targets in Israel and the Gulf, and against states not involved in the attacks. International law allows for a defensive military response to armed aggression, but only against military targets. Iran has launched strikes on 27 American military bases, across Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as on Israeli military facilities, but also on civilian infrastructure and residential areas.
Already the US-Israeli attack has killed at least 787 Iranians including, most tragically, 165 civilians, mostly schoolgirls, in an attack on Saturday on a girls’ elementary school in Minab. At least 52 people have also been killed in Israel’s attack on Lebanon, and at least 27 have been killed in Israel and the Gulf region in Iran’s retaliatory strikes. The danger of even greater escalation is severe, and could lead to chaos in Iran and across the region. This war can only bring further death and destruction, and will do nothing to bring freedom to the people of Iran, who are now caught between US and Israeli bombs and regime bullets, or peace or stability to any country in the region.
American and Israeli foreign intervention is not about helping the people of Iran, but about gaining further neo-colonial control in the region. Significantly, this is motivated by Israel’s desire to continue its ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestine with even further impunity.
UK involvement and arms supplies
Following the start of the war, our government has once again aligned itself with the deadly violence of American foreign policy. Despite Starmer’s earlier promises that British military bases would not be used by the United States in any escalatory aggression in the region, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper continues to defend the government’s decision to go against its word and allow the US to use British bases for its attacks.
With British military bases in use and British planes “in the sky”, it is hard to believe this is anything other than the UK being pulled back into another American war in the Middle East, no matter how much our government states any British involvement is for so-called “defensive purposes”.
British involvement in these attacks goes beyond allowing the use of its bases by the US. In particular, both US and Israeli forces have used F-35 fighter jets in their strikes on Iran, 15% of which are produced in the UK. Indeed, the F-35 has played a crucial role in the war owing to its stealth capabilities, making it the first line of attack in ‘contested’ air space. The F-35 also played a crucial role in Israel’s previous attack on Iran in June 2025. The F-35 was also used by the US in its illegal attack on Venezuela in January.
Key components for F-35s are produced across England and Scotland, including:
- the rear fuselage by BAE Systems in Samlesbury, Lancashire
- the active interceptor system by BAE Systems in Rochester, Kent
- the targeting lasers by Leonardo in Edinburgh
- the bomb release cables by L3 Harris in Brighton.
In allowing the continued supply of F-35 components to Israel (via the US), despite their use in the genocide in Gaza, the UK government claimed that these supplies could not be stopped without jeopardising the global supply chain for the F-35 programme as a whole, which it claimed was crucial for preserving “peace and security”. But instead of peace and security, we are seeing this aircraft used again and again for illegal aggression and untold death, destruction and instability.
This illegal war of aggression, with all its devastating consequences, should call into question not only the UK’s long-standing subservience to US foreign policy and support for military aggression, but also its deep military and military-industrial dependence on, and intertwining with the United States and its arms industry. The US’s overwhelmingly dominant military machine, far from being a guarantee of global peace and international law, is – along with Russia, Israel, the UAE, and many others – one of its primary destroyers.
CAAT calls upon the UK government to:
- Reverse its decision to allow the US to use UK military bases to attack Iran, issue a clear condemnation of the US-Israeli war as a violation of international law, and ensure that the UK plays no part in the war going forward.
- Withdraw from the F-35 programme, immediately halting all F-35 component supplies to the US and Israel
- Suspend all arms supplies to the US that can be used for illegal military action against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, or other countries that have been threatened militarily by the US
- Work to reduce UK arms imports from the US, and end UK military and arms industry dependence on the US, pursuing a foreign and defence policy based on collective security, human rights and respect for international law.
Thanks Alan: How Lockheed Martin, Raytheon & BAE Systems are propagandizing children to support war through STEM
The most infamous arms companies manufacturing the very bombs for the United States and Israel to use in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran are partnering up with the U.S. military to fund STEM mathematics programs to propagandize children in the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and others.
Essays by Native American authors and activity on contemporary Native issues, including the quincentenary.
Table of Contents:
- Wind River / DeLinda Wunder
- The state of native North America / Evelyn Hu-DeHart
- Sand Creek: the morning after / M. Annette Jaimes
- Key Indian laws and cases / Ward Churchill and Glenn T. Morris
- The demography of native North America : a question of American Indian survival / Lenore A. Stiffarm with Phil Lane, Jr.
- International law and politics : toward a right to self-determination for indigenous peoples / Glenn T. Morris
- Self-determination and subordination : the past, present, and future of American Indian governance / Rebecca L. Robbins
- Federal Indian identification policy : a usurpation of indigenous sovereignty in North America / M. Annette Jaimes
- The earth is our mother : struggles for American Indian land and liberation in the contemporary United States / Ward Churchill
- American Indian water rights : the blood of life in native North America / Marianna Guerrero
- In usual and accustomed places : contemporary American Indian fishing rights struggles / The Institute for Natural Progress.
- (cont.) Native North America : the political economy of radioactive colonialism / Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke
- Trouble in high places : erosion of American Indian rights to religious freedom in the United States / Vine Deloria, Jr.
- A warrior caged : the continuing struggle of Leonard Peltier / Jim Vander Wall
- American Indian women : at the center of indigenous resistance in contemporary North America / M. Annette Jaimes with Theresa Halsey
- Patriots and pawns : state use of American Indians in the military and the process of nativization in the United States / Tom Holm
- American Indian education in the United States : indoctrination for subordination to colonialism / by Jorge Noreiga
- The great pretenders : further reflections on whiteshamanism / by Wendy Rose
- Cowboys and … notes on art, literature, and American Indians in the modern American mind / by Jimmie Durham
- Looking for Columbus : thought on the past, present and future of humanity / John Mohawk.
Paul Haeder, Author 