Is the silence of the American people complicity in War Crimes?
[ Editors Note from 2014: With all the new events and material coming in to write about, taking time to cruise through our archives to pull out some golden oldies often falls victim to the procrastination monster.
But we are going to make an effort this year to repost some of the gems so our newer readers get at least a peek at what we were dealing with a few years ago.
By dealing with all of these stories, VT has become a story itself…its evolution in the turbulent times we live in and having to make decisions about what we need to be doing to continue riding the tiger that we often feel we are on.
Part of that process is to review the changes we have made in the past that really helped push us along in this ever changing Internet publication work. It is still a work in progress, as are we.
Gordon wrote a lot of passionate commentary back then. No source cites are needed when writing from the heart. Often he would be telling me these stories over a one hour phone call, and I would say, “You know, you should write the up as it would make a good article”.
He would just grab his keyboard and the words would just pour out. So enjoy a DufFster classic with a bit of updated layout …but the story remains the same…Jim W. Dean ]
JD Note: 2020 – JS in the comments below was stimulated to dig some out himself, which got me to add a comment to his and I dug up this 1970 Emerson, Lake, and Palmer classic, “Take a pebble”. It brought back more memories, a turbulent time for me, no Vietnam but a near fatal car wreck which nixed my budding chemical engineering career which I had invested so much into.
But life just comes at you and you just have to deal with it. If a fortune teller would have predicted what I would be doing today, I would have asked for a refund as I could not have imagined writing and publishing. But we work with what we have and do the best we can to be able to find sweet spot in life before the grim reaper pays a visit.
And as Gordon often says, our generation saw a music era that probably will never be repeated, starting with Elvis, the Beach Boys, Momas and the Pappas, and then on to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, ELP, and so many others.
It was wonderful, except for Keith Emerson putting a bullet in his head. At least he left something valuable behind, including a son named Aaron, after Aaron Copeland the composer, and still playing the music live with orchestras. Enjoy.
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The Story Remains the Same
Nuremberg Ticket
I am not against war. I am a combat veteran. I sit on my tail, watch TV, go to restaurants and have fond delusional memories about Vietnam.
In my bedroom closet, I have a trash bag. It is never opened, it has been there for years. It has, along with other “military mementos,” a small green “government issued” address book. Marines, long ago, scrawled their names in it.
Half of them never came back from Vietnam, never had children, grandchildren, got to finish college or even high school. Many, maybe most, had never had sex, owned a car or traveled more than 50 miles from home.
Their lives were stolen, stolen then and we are doing it every day, maybe not the numbers, not on such a grand scale, but the lessons of Vietnam have more than been forgotten. The brightest time in American history, another “greatest generation” may well have been the one that stopped an evil and corrupt war.
That generation saw the cost. Only the young and the parents of those the war destroyed knew Vietnam. America simply turned away, a nation of, do we call them, do we call us, cowards? Is there another term?
Of the two to three million that survived, a hundred thousand were seriously physically disabled and a million more suffered lifelong Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Not long after coming home, another 50,000 would die, some of mysterious illnesses, many by suicide. 50,000 or more went to prison, some for a few years, some are still there.
One of my closest friends, LCpl. Daniel K. Staggs, winner of the Silver Star, would die in prison. A stabbing.
A lot of America’s Vietnam prison inmates were decorated
STAGGS, DANIEL ALBERT Citation:
The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star Medal to Daniel Albert Staggs (2371706), Private First Class, U.S. Marine Corps, for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action while serving as a Scout with Company E, Second Battalion, Twenty-Sixth Marines, THIRD Marine Division, in connection with operations against the enemy in the Republic of Vietnam.
On 6 June 1968, while conducting a patrol southeast of Con Thien, a platoon from Company E suddenly came under an intense automatic weapons and hand grenade attack from a well entrenched North Vietnamese Army force and sustained numerous casualties.
Observing that the wounded men lay in positions dangerously exposed to hostile fire, Private First Class Staggs volunteered to assist in moving them to a covered area.
After aiding a companion in carrying a mortally wounded Marine into a bomb crater, he quickly realized that the intense fire from an enemy sniper prevented the other casualties from being evacuated. Seizing a machine gun, he unhesitatingly left his concealed position, and accompanied by another Marine, rushed across the fire-swept area and returned with an injured man.
When his companion was mortally wounded, Private First Class Staggs immediately retrieved the radio carried by the man and established communications with an aerial observer. Although inexperienced in medical evacuation procedures, he quickly organized a helicopter landing zone and supervised the movement of wounded Marines into a central location for medial evacuation.
Continuing his determined efforts, he then skillfully guided helicopters into the zone, thereby providing lifesaving evacuation for numerous casualties.
By his courage, bold initiative and unswerving devotion to duty at great personal risk, Private First Class Staggs inspired all who observed him and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.
_________________________________
Reagan and Henry – Are they laughing at having gotten over on us?
By 1972, only a few troops were in Vietnam, fighting a “rear guard” holding action while America pretended it had won “peace with honor” at the bargaining table in Paris. A monster named Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Prize for that farce. Have we no shame?
The vast majority of Americans didn’t have 30 seconds a day to watch news about the war, not a minute a month to think about it, much less do something, take a stand for what was right.
These are the people that love to hear about hippies and airport spitters. These people love Ollie North and John McCain, cartoon heroes for a nation too dead inside to care.
Scary terrorists and endless wars are bread and butter for the “drug store Marine” and “Hanoi John.” You don’t know them by the these names, the monikers they were tagged with by their fellow officers after Vietnam?
Carefully hear what they say, that pair of bloated peddlers of death. Are they continually undermining America through the fear and mistrust their every word sews while they rake in millions? Why are men like this whose pasts reek of the worst abuses imaginable, allowed to dishonor our dead while strutting around playing hero? Why has their real history been buried though the stench remains?
Vietnam had real heroes. They aren’t flying in private jets, eating at the finest restaurants, 58,000 of them came home dead, many in pieces, some burned to cinders.
It wasn’t just the 58,000 dead or the 50,000 soon to die or the maimed or damaged, the imprisoned or the endless thousands poisoned with Agent Orange. Oh, did we tell you that Agent Orange may have killed more Vietnam veterans than total combat deaths in World War II? According to Israeli officials, there are more holocaust survivors than living Vietnam veterans.
This isn’t news, no more than dozens dying each day from Gulf War Illness,no more than the Iraq/Afghanistan vet than commits suicide every 36 hours.
A lean Dufster – but a big target, with the cursed rifle than always jammed at the worst times. The long arms made him a boxing champ.
Vietnam was a scam. The South Vietnamese government was brutal and corrupt, hated by all. North Vietnam was never part of a communist conspiracy to infiltrate America and force the evils of communism on our children.
When more documents are declassified and the lying slows down, I am absolutely certain that the first Gulf War is going to turn out to be a scam also.
It is out there, the reason Saddam invaded Kuwait, and when it comes out, the Americans responsible for misleading us into war after war after war will will die of old age, honored and respected with their offshore bank accounts brimming with blood money.
The countless dead were forgotten long ago being the “un-newsworthy” lot they were.
We already know, we and our gutless British cousins, that Bush and Blair and their cronies sent hundreds of thousands to war in 2003 based on, not only lies, but a plot to undermine the democratic freedoms of both governments and prestage the western world in their own image, totalitarian, interventionist and totally owned and operated by an international cabal of financial criminals.
Take a look at politics. The same criminal empire controls, not only each party but they “throw the bums out” gang as well. Billionaire Bush crony David Koch, a shadowy Israeli-American is underwriting the “grass roots” movement to restore our constitution. He is also the same person who funded those who tore it apart.
Those who think they are electing “Tea Party” candidates will have a rude awakening. When the bill comes due, they will be dancing to the same tune. Recent as it was, few Americans realize what the Gulf War really brought us. We got that “New World Order” that “Pappy” Bush promised us in his “points of light” speech.
“How do you like it so far?”
The Age of the Banksters is upon us
What we got was an end to America as we know it, a government taking orders from Tel Aviv and a “New World Order” economy now openly looting the world, eating away even America’s standard of living and flushing it down the toilet, turning the United States into a debt-ridden third world hell hole.
The Romans gave away bread and amused the public with blood drenched spectacles in the arena. Our “bread and circuses” game is Islamophobia, phony “self induced” terrorism and exploitation of sub-human racial hatreds thinly veiled under the childish misnomer of “conservatism.”
Anyone who isn’t suspicious of 9/11, the TV spectacular whose original cast of “19” now includes thousands, as years of credible research and investigation has proven, will gladly send others to die in their name around the world. Ignorance is complicity.
Anyone who doesn’t realize that the Bush cover story, now being resold under the “Ground Zero Mosque” label, is the most outlandish “conspiracy theory” in history is capable of cheerleading for any sociopathic political clown from Caligula to Hitler to Cheney.
We have to end our war because America can no longer trust itself. With all of Americas media outlets owned by defense firms, lets call them “war profiteers” and be honest about it or citizens of the State of Israel, a “huckster” nation, smaller than Vermont that is the third largest weapons exporter in the world, no American can be certain about anything, what is true or false, what is fact, what is myth.
Every day every America is told two things. Don’t trust your government. Don’t trust your press. Both things are correct.
The problem, of course, is that those that control the message control both the government and the press. The “new” government they continually offer is always the “old government” and the new lies are always the old lies, enemies, new plots, new fears.
If what you believe is based on what you hear and see, whether it is an airplane crashing into a building or someone telling you that ending years of corrupt tax abatements for billionaires is going to end the world, something is always being kept from you.
That something is what is true, what is real. “But I saw it!” Yes, you saw something then someone explained it all. What you want to do is ask yourself, who made money from this? Who can control the news?
Where do the real conspirators live, caves in Afghanistan or inside the Beltway in Washington or the coffee shops of Tel Aviv. Did I forget London?
A few months ago, we learned that 824,000 Americans have top secret security clearances. How much do you think those nearly one million people know that would shock or sicken you? Are only 10,000 involved in illegal conspiracies? What if every Israeli spy flushed at the same time, would the Great Lakes suddenly disappear?
I hope this isn’t news to you, but most of history’s wars were started with a “false flag” attack. A government attacks its own people to justify what it, out of delusion, tells itself is going to be best for everyone in the long run. The fact that billions, even trillions is made, not made, really stolen, is never spoken of.
Nobody attacks a nation with 70% of the world’s military might. It would only attack itself, “with a little help from its friends.”
How is America dealing with Afghanistan? Though a few lunatics are still running around talking about poor dead Osama bin Laden and imaginary Al Qaeda, the mysterious worldwide conspiracy of cab drivers, waiters and dishwashers, most Americans have forgotten Afghanistan.
Wasn’t there a Brad Pitt movie about Al Qaeda? Think about the terrorist masterminds we manage to catch. Doesn’t this remind you of something? Didn’t we see this in the movie Fight Club? What is the first rule of Fight Club? I am not allowed to tell you.
THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB…DON’T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB!
Whenever Al Qaeda, the mythical “Fight Club” clone steps onto the scene, after the phony press reads their scripts, “Building 7 has just collapsed even though nothing hit it…..no wait a minute….oh…Building 7 is going to mysteriously collapse in two hours they are telling me now….(parody of BBC 9/11 “error”)
Many years ago, there was a popular TV series called Dallas. The underlying story was about competition between two brothers one evil but fun and one good but boring as hell.
After a couple of seasons, one brother, Bobby Ewing, the boring one, tragically died. The actor playing the part, Patrick Duffy, wanted to leave the show, thus his character was killed off.
The next season, Duffy reconsidered his decision. The network simply raised him from the dead, begining an episode where he is suddenly alive again, taking a shower.
DEAD, NOT DEAD, WE’RE THE NETWORKS, WE CAN DO ANYTHING WE WANT
The BBC coverage of Building 7 at the World Trade Center is another “Bobby Ewing returns from the dead” thing. Two episodes later, viewers will forget. More Americans remember the shock of seeing Bobby Ewing alive in the shower than “accidentally” hearing the report of a major disaster than hadn’t happened yet.
What do you say of a generation of Americans who can’t say Palestinian without adding “terrorist” but watch cluster bombs being dropped on playgrounds in Gaza and are willing to accept it as “poor frightened Israel” protecting herself.
This is the kind of ignorance that begged 9/11 and was amply rewarded. This is the kind of ignorance that will burn an American city to the ground with a “terrorist nuke” simply to remove Iran from competition in the oil and gas pipeline business.
Oh, newspapers don’t report such things, not on the sports pages anyway. Millions of Americans are in a rage about an Islamic center being built in lower Manhattan because of sabre rattling by an Israeli run news organization commonly known as Fox. Hundreds of hours have been spent railing at terrorists funding the project.
This week, a competing network, on a very popular news program, the genuinely humorous Daily Show with Jon Stewart, pointed out that the primary funding for what Fox News calls “the terrorist mosque” is one of the primary owners of Fox News.
I keep seeing Bobby Ewing in the shower and the lame BBC reporter telling about the building withering to the ground, as CBS News anchor, Dan Rather described it, “as though someone had planted dynamite.”
Over 40 years ago, Americans of conscience went to the streets to end a war. They saved more than just the lives of American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians, they restored Americas honor.
Control of American education and media, whether by Zionists, right wing fanatics, thieving banksters or a coalition of “evildoers” combining all three, has attempted to rewrite history. We are told mobs in airports attacked returning soldiers.
We are told thousands of Americans died because of protests, not because of Kissinger’s lies. Those who know better are still alive, some still awake and too many silent.
Broken minds and broken bodies
A generation of soldiers, now men and women, return from war, maimed, crushed and thrown away. 21st century America sees nothing, not the corruption, the narcotics, the lies, the evil in what has gone on so long in the name of the people of the United States.
What is war? All war is class struggle. If we still had more communists around, they would remind us. Rich people start wars, poor people die and resources are stolen, banks emptied and all of it hidden behind flag waving and childish scare tactics. War is part of the grander plan. Is war politics or is it economics?
At one point in the last 2 years, it was estimated there there were as few as 12 “potential Al Qaeda suspects” in Afghanistan.
The person reading my water meter is a “potential suspect.” To a paranoid or law enforcement officer, anything that moves is a “person of interest.” A “suspect” is a person of interest who isn’t sleeping or dead.
Thousands of such “suspects” have been kidnapped and tortured by the United States over the last decade. The vast majority were released, some with millions in cash to shut them up, some died and a few were railroaded to criminal convictions based on false testimony and phony evidence. Who would want to protest against that? Would you want to die to defend that? Your children already have.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. He is a disabled veteran and has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades. Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world's largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than "several" countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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