JUSTICE FOR LIBERTY

Over on Counterpunch, Alison Weir has an article about how one of the MSM, 'USA Today', either utterly ignored the USS Liberty aniversary or misreported it through gross inaccuracies that would lead an unsuspecting reader to the stupefyingly improbable position that the two-hour Israeli attack was a case of "mistaken identification" ('USA Today and the USS Liberty', www.counterpunch.com/weir06232007.html).

Apparently, in the eyes of "USA Today', any reasonable person who would entertain the possibility that if on a bright calm crystal-clear June day a certain nation's pilots report over the radio to their headquarters that a ship they have been watching for 8 hours is American by its flag and configuration, and if the pilots are then told to attack it anyway, and if after they fire all their rockets and napalm and leave, and if then an hour or so later elements of that same certain nation's surface navy arrive and then launch torpedoes into into the US Navy ship and then machine-gun the crew and liferafts of said US Navy ship ... well, anyone who would lean toward the strong possibility that such a country's attack was intentional would simply be a 'conspiracy theory' wingnut. Yah. I'd say that anyone who could swallow the 'mistaken identity' excuse is either - as the Victorians used to say - "a scoundrel or a fool". I'll go a tad further: I assert that to be a Liberty-denier is tantamount to being a Holocaust-denier. And that same certain nation is techy as all hell about folks denying its Holocaust.

How can it possibly be that We have come to this pass? That Our own government refuses to impose appropriate consequences for the crapulous criminal treachery, the act of war, perpetrated against Us on that June day in 1967?

Of course, one part of the answer is that the government itself refused to go to the assistance of the ship when it sent a clear and timely distress call reporting itself under attack. Indeed, the government recalled not one but two flights of Navy warplanes launched as a matter of course to defend the ship. Our government. Did that.

But that just makes the initial question even more intense: How the hell have We come to this? How in hell did this happen? What keeps it going? What in hell is wrong with our mainstream media? What has been wrong with them - on this point certainly - for 40 years? Because almost no MSM notice of the 40th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty has been taken (and yet for several months now Our attention has been invited loudly and unceasingly to the 40th anniversary of the release of a Beatles album).

This site has already Posted a couple of times on USS Liberty ('Infamy' and 'Unprofessionally Military', both in June of 2007). Let me get more into the dynamics that I think might answer that question.

The Democrats under LBJ were well aware in 1965 that they were going to pay at the polls for their support of the Civil Rights Act of that year, and were then stunned into political terror when the Watts riots erupted less than a week after LBJ had put the Party on the line by signing the Act. The Party was desperate to replace all those white Southron voters who would (and did) leave the Party after 1965.

The Party's embrace and slavish nurture of the assorted Identities and their assorted revolutions staring in the mid-1960s, including as well its support of the entirely novel 'phase' of Civl Rights that it termed "affirmative racism", can be explained in great part as a desperate political strategy to raise fresh blocs of voters out of the very earth.

In addition to the new Identities, however, the Party turned to the American Jewish demographic. This was hardly surprising. The American Jewish community had been deeply intertwined with the Democratic Party since the earliest days of the New Deal, the traditional Jewish concern for social justice meshing neatly with huge opportunities for communal self-betterment and advancement in those remarkable days of the 1930s.

But in the later 1940s, led by another vote-desperate President - Harry Truman - the Party had quickly recognized the absolute political need to recognize the State of Israel. It was an iffy proposition from the point of view of the best interests of the United States; anyone looking at the postwar Detroit gas-guzzlers in their chrome-plated excess could see that an awful lot of oil was now going to be a national necessity. But at the time We were still living off domestic oil production and 'the Arabs' could still be mistaken for merely the last, shredded remnants of the Ottoman Empire.

The Soviets started dabbling in the Middle East, and courted the Arab nations, who invited them in through the front door, to counter the influence of the Israeli state that the US had dropped in through a hole chopped in the roof. That set the tone for the 1950s, with the US now trying to keep a rein on its bumptious and hardly subservient client state - Israel - as the Soviets tried to pull the Arab nations into the modern world sufficiently to complicate US diplomacy in the Middle East.

By the early 1960s JFK knew that within a very few years US domestic oil was going to be unable to fulfill the majority of the country's needs. He was looking at some amount of rapprochement with the now-able-to-stand Arab nations that had been erected on top of the planet's largest known oil reserves. But suddenly he was gone. That was 1963.

Then came 1965, as above described. Then came that June of 1967. The Israelis were going to have their pre-emptive war and the Arabs, cocky because of their Soviet support, were inclined to give it to them. LBJ was already up to his big jug ears in Vietnam and things weren't going well there. And he needed all the domestic support he could get.

And so, as the Liberty incident demonstrates, the Democrats indeed went 'soft' on national defense. But not primarily because they 'lost' Vietnam, but because they had permitted an attack - an act of war - upon an American naval vessel to continue, and many members of its crew massacred. And then having thus committed an act of treachery against the United States, the vote-starved Democrats initiated - with the help of a mostly friendly media - a cover-up. A cover-up aided and abetted by the 'political correctness' that was already helping to lubricate the path of the newly-hatching Identities.

In the end, while the media focused on the eventual loss of Vietnam, the far more culpable failure - indeed treason - in the matter of the USS Liberty attack was enveloped and smothered in the dust of events. Purposely. Israel was now our 'ally'. No treaty, no request for one, and no agreement to abide by any regulations, restrictions or rule or law except those of its own privileged interests - as if Israel had appointed itself to "00" status, like the then-new James Bond's status as "007". Do whatever it takes, Mr. Bond.

Of course it was a 'special' ally. Oh yeah! What other ally had committed an act of war that shed copious amounts of American blood and been met with a unilateral American bestowal of 'alliance'? Without any treaty needing to be signed? And was showered with American foreign and military aid in consequence of its act of war?

The Democrats' greatest betrayal of the Sixties wasn't Vietnam. Not hardly. And it constitutes one of the great reasons for the Democrats decades-long refusal to face up to the Liberty incident: the Democrats and the Israelis are now bound by what in SS circles was known as the Blutbund: the bond that arises from knowing that each has shed innocent blood. The Israelis committed an act of war and arguably a war crime. The Democrats not only committed the treason of allowing it, but then rendered their treason ongoing by actually paying the Israelis huge sums in military and foreign aid with the money of the very People the Democrats had betrayed.

But as the Seventies progressed, another 'crime' - and this one also ongoing - was layered into this mess, layer upon layer like a lasagna. The Israelis, cashing the checks without yielding to the desperate affections of their truckling suitors, developed a strong PAC presence whereby great chunks of the tax monies sent to them would be kicked back to American pols in the form of political donations. Before long Democrat and - increasingly - Republican pols were hooked onto the steady flow of kickback cash. And in a country where no reliable voter-majority could be maintained, where a single litmus-test could determine candidacies and elections, both Parties had quietly come to the conclusion that money was a pol's best friend.

Thirdly, in a synergy that became more manipulable as time went on, the Victimist and the Manichean mindsets replaced a prior public maturity at the very heart and soul of Our culture. The Victimist mindset reduced Our public emotional posture to a toxic combination of paranoid fear and outraged vengeance: there is danger of crime and there are criminals lurking everywhere, folks must take the word of the 'experts' that only vengeance can stop these perpetrators, and nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of stopping them, and if anybody doubts that then let them look upon the victim of this outrageous crime (cue filmclip). Replacing the old American sense of balance and pragmatism about crime with an unquenchable bathos and outrage on behalf of the Victim certainly rendered American public discourse and atttiude far more amenable to the foreign policy gambits of the Israeli government, which of course represented and indeed constituted the greatest Victimization of them all: the Holocaust and the on-going obstructions of the Arab states to the agenda and vision of the Israeli state.

The Manichean mindset replaced a complex, nuanced, careful assessment of and well-considered response to events with a crude, vivid, simplistic either-or: you're either with us or against us, and if you doubt that then that proves you're against us too (Hitler used the code phrase "und niemals verzweifeln"), and since you oppose us then you must be pure Evil because (this part politely left unspoken until 1994 or so) we are pure Good. This was a child's unripeness, reflecting - as it does in children - an incompletely developed cognitive apparatus and a lack of experience and reflection upon experience (including mediation upon one's own mistakes, failures, and sins ... like them Kathliks always depress you about). But now it became the national mindset and heartset.

The MSM thus are very very leery of the USS Liberty incident. Both Democrats and Republicans have huge amounts to lose, including being exposed as being agents of a foreign state and having placed the programme of a foreign state above America's for the purpose of political expediency and personal enrichment - over and above the original trahison of June 1967 itself. None of the MSM's corporate bosses are going to start reporting on a situation where there are no identifiable Good Guys and so where the story cannot be told - even with 'spin' - with any influential Player benefitting. All the Players at this table are guilty, and it's blood-guilt. In a corporate-run MSM where 'reporting' is now sold to the most attractive bidder, there will be no takers for the USS Liberty's story.

Robert McNamara is still within US jurisdiction. So for that matter is Jimmy Carter, who in 1980 went on his knees getting the Israelis to pay some indemnity to the survivors, which money Congress promptly included in the next check to the Israelis. The Israelis had to be begged to pay surviving servicemen and their families with money that Congress would be only too happy to provide ... and they still did it only grudgingly. A special ally indeed. Sooo speshullll.

What do McNamara and Carter have to say about all this? We should ask them. But I mean "We" in the most fundamental sense of the People. I can't think of any of our elected representatives, past or present, who might consider themselves to be 'in a position' to ask on Our behalf.

So the USS Liberty incident is not merely the tip of the iceberg. It provides a portal directly to the core of it. Or to the bottom of it. Where be dragons far more foul and lethal than any of the dinosaurs the Fundies claim were booked into steerage on the Ark with the lions and the lambs.

UNPROFESSIONALLY MILITARY

This site has consistently pointed out that by the very nature of the military organization, professionals (doctors, lawyers, clergy) cannot reliably discharge their full ethical obligations in the military setting. See, for example, “Bishops Bomb” on this site from November 2006).

The matter of the USS Liberty is presently receiving long-delayed attention. Jeff St. Clair’s article “Israel’s Attack on the USS Liberty, Revisited”,
http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair06082007.html) is only one of the many. There are others on the Counterpunch site and you are well-advised to check out the survivors’ association's hugely informative site: www.ussliberty.org. As an aside, let me say that even I had to pause at St. Clair’s profoundly shocking suggestion, well-founded by the facts he presents, that Moshe Dayan wanted the USS Liberty sunk – and with no survivors – in order to blame it on the Egyptians. We forget, far too often, just what the Holocaust did to elite Jewish political and moral thinking and thus later to the Israeli state. When they say that absolutely nothing will be allowed to threaten them ever again, they mean a lot more than most law-abiding people would think. To the extent that – God having let them down in the Holocaust – the Israeli state will do ‘whatever it takes’, thank you … to that extent Israel is a lawless state: it acknowledges no law above its own interests.

Of course you could say that’s the whole nature of a ‘state’ in the post-Westphalian age. But while the old pre-World War 1 era Foreign Office dictum that “gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail” may indeed seem quaint, I can’t see Washington or Lincoln approving the Israeli attack (whatever its actual motivations); in fact, I can’t even see Teedy Roosevelt proposing it, and he was the first Presidential “cowboy”.

In fact, I wonder now if Bush himself wasn’t infected by the Israeli ‘thinking’, rather than – as might too easily be supposed – the other way around. And if so, then the lawlessness of this Administration, rising to the level of “treachery” Constitutionally-defined, is provided benefit of ‘clergy’ not only by Fundamentalism (that claims that once you are God’s chosen then anything you do is ‘good’, going Nixon way better in justifying his dictum that “When the President does it, then it’s not illegal”). But also by some Israeli politico-religious illumination that once you are God’s victim, then you are entitled to “do whatever it takes” to make sure you don’t get thus blessed again. For if there is no ‘law’ beyond an entity to which it must submit itself, and since all earthly entities are incapable of assuring their own moral integrity, then any such entity – individual or corporate – is for all practical purposes lawless.

For a government and a People sending troops abroad for the purposes of war (all those little plastic flags stuck onto cars represented far far more than a sentimental Princess-Di moment), then the consequences are awe-full in their import. What did it mean when a young German solider wrote home to his wife about shooting Russian POWs who had already surrendered: “If you make yourself think that these men had killed German soldiers, then it’s not so hard … Please don’t read this letter to our children” …?

Have We given any thought as to how many American soldiers are writing (or emailing or texting or what-have-you) such a sentiment to their own spouses: “Please don’t tell our children about this”. What are We doing to our troops? We have sent them into a moral Little Big Horn from which they will not return as We knew them.Who will bear responsibility for this before Heaven? Will We the People seek to avoid Our responsibility in this moral debacle as so many of the reprehensible Beltway-Bunch are now doing? Will We demean Ourselves by bleating like Mussolini when he was finally cornered by his own jittery accomplices: “I Tedeschi sono responsabili di tutto” … the Germans are responsible for the whole thing … ? And will Heaven accept that when even the Fascist Grand Council and the little King Victor Emmanuel didn’t?

We are now widely informed of Catholic bishops and Fundy chaplains and even Fundy ex-Seals pseudo-chaplains cheerleading this leprous war; of medical doctors sending the wounded back into combat and of allowing others to rot in decrepit hospitals; of military psychologists actively and eagerly participating in the enterprise of torture; and of military lawyers mixed up in everything from torture and improper detention and kidnapping to the corruption embodied in the combatant tribunals and the corrosion of civil rights to the benefit military ‘law’. The Counterpunch, Truthout, and Alternet sites are just the entry-points to explore this rich, depressing, alarming lode of information.

Now here comes the latest example: the Navy JAG officer who advised the Inquiry officer in the USS Liberty matter has recently deposed that the whitewash sham of a ‘Report’ issued by that Inquiry – accepting the blatantly ridiculous and morally obscene Israeli excuse(s) that it was a case of mistaken identity – was ordered by the White House. And the retired chief JAG of the Navy of that time – this officer’s superior in the lawyer corps – acknowledges the same and is now demanding that the truth come out and be shown for what it is.

Both of them are to be commended. Serving the work of Truth is – famously – a very important job of morally mature and ‘honorable’ adults. And even more so of officers and gentlemen. And, We are ever fondly given to think, of lawyers.

But it’s damned late in the game. More to the point here, both of these men have demonstrated that in the military-justice world you are an officer first and a lawyer – or a servant of Truth – second. A very very distant second. They were ordered by the President … ooooh. We think of the torture-whores of “24” reverently intoning “the President” like Mel Brooks’s hilarious, pompously clueless “Blazing Saddles” Western townsfolk intoned – chorally – “Randolph Scott”.

So if you are an officer first, then the ‘law’ of your profession, the ‘higher law’, is effectively abolished. You are now under the ‘law’ of the regime that is giving the orders – which not-so-distant history teaches Us is the equivalent of being under no law at all.

Let these officers now make amends to Truth; let them be recalled to “their old allegiance” (as Lincoln referred to the returning former Confederate states). And may the officers and crew of USS Liberty – living and dead – be ‘justified’ for what they have suffered in Our service, at Our hands.

But these officers, and all the officials – civilian and military – who enabled this monstrous cover-up, have much to make up for. What might have happened in world history if this nation had refused to indulge the premeditated and deliberate attacks on Our sailors and Our ship? If back then We had given the rambunctious Israeli state the clear message that there are consequences for pulling obscene, criminal crap like this … ? How many now dead might be alive? What broad, sunlit uplands now cut off from so many might have been accessible to children whose lives have been deformed by injustice and untruth when not actually snuffed out by military action?

What awesome, awe-full, Hell-hot irony: that We now find Ourselves in thrall to an obscene, criminal, crapulous administration that took its schooling from the very perpetrators, not only unpunished but lavished with treasure, who were allowed to so indecently assault Us forty long Biblical years ago.

There is indeed a Law in this Universe. And it’s come for Us. We must return to our old allegiance.

INFAMY

We are approaching the anniversary of that repeated and unprovoked attack on the United States Navy, without a declaration of war, that resulted in the deaths of a number of US sailors. It constituted an act of war.

Worse, insofar as armed relief units were deliberately and personally ordered to desist by the Secretary at the direction of the President, it constituted an act of treachery by this nation’s highest leaders unequaled in the peacetime history of this nation (up to the present, of course).

Stanley Heller writes clearly and forcefully about it on Counterpunch (“Arrest Robert McNamara”, www.counterpunch.com/heller06012007.html).

In broad and cloudless daylight, in international waters, displaying a large and then an even larger Stars and Stripes (the larger one run up after the first one had been shot away) flying straight out in a 12-knot breeze, on June 8, 1967, the lightly-armed USS Liberty was over the course of half an hour repeatedly attacked by a dozen Israeli aircraft, dropping napalm, shooting 30mm cannon shells and rockets. After that half an hour they broke off.

In response to the ship’s distress call, combat aircraft from the carrier USS Saratoga were launched. Before they could get to the ship, they were recalled, on the direct radio-telephoned orders of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

That gave the Israeli Navy a chance to attack with torpedo boats, most likely to see if they could sink the ‘evidence’ (they almost did). And to machine gun life rafts to ‘remove’ witnesses (they partially succeeded).

And when another set of aircraft were launched from the carrier, McNamara recalled them too.

In response to the on-scene flag-officer’s demand for confirmation from ‘higher up the chain’ for such a monstrous and reprehensible order, LBJ himself then got on the line and said that “he would not have his allies embarrassed”.

Then there was an inquiry, hastily convened. In 2004, the very elderly and retired senior legal counsel for that Inquiry swore in an affidavit that “both Admiral Kidd (the presiding officer) and I believed with certainty that this attack was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew … I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of mistaken identity despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

The Israelis later claimed responsibility for their ‘mistake’ and paid some indemnity. If such a sustained attack under such conditions was a mistake on their part, then the Israelis should not be allowed to operate heavy machinery, let alone nuclear weapons.

“Embarrassed” is hardly the correct word. “Allies” is not at all the correct word: this nation did not have then and has never had and does not now have a treaty of military alliance with the State of Israel.

The commission, by the by, that followed its orders into rank untruth, included a retired Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps and – wait for it – a retired chief JAG of the Navy. They were only following orders, as befits a flag-officer and a gentleman.

LBJ having gotten out of the frying pan in 1972, only Mr. McNamara remains within US jurisdiction. Heller concludes with the candid exhortation “Arrest him”. Surely, there is no statute of limitations on treason that resulted in the deaths of American servicemen. And with the Marine Corps currently seeing its way clear to prosecute Individual Ready Reservists for wearing parts of their uniforms to protest against the Iraq War (WMD! Osama and Saddam! Mushroom clouds! Slam dunk! We’ll be greeted as liberators! We don’t torture!), then surely some room might be made in a military courtroom for Mr. McNamara’s case. And the survivors and families of the deceased must be – who can deny it? – the only ignored bunch of victims in modern US history.

Let us hope and pray that it happens. It’s summertime and those few kangaroos rousted from their domicile in the courtroom for the duration of the military justice proceedings should not have too hard a time of it. Or they could always be stabled in the courtroom next door. With the cavalry horses gone, kangaroos are about the only animals left in the military stable, except for the Dobermans and the dolphins.

But I’d like to go on a bit with this Israeli matter. As was mentioned in a recent Post, it was in the late Sixties that the Holocaust really picked up steam as a historical topic of wide interest. Before that time the ‘killing of the Jews’, never denied, was just one of the many nasty results of the Nazi imperium. No disrespect to the dead was intended thereby – certainly not by schoolchildren – but there were so many millions of dead that it was hard for the mind to get too selective. And to what purpose?

I think that there is a conceptual congruence of the highest order between the Holocaust’s enthronement and the policy aims of the Israeli state. For it was precisely the awfulness of the Holocaust that has justified what that State has done and been doing since its inception.

We recall that the desire for a Jewish return to Palestine long-predated the Second World War. The Hebrew scriptures and the history of the Hebrew people were deeply entwined with that land, and it was not considered dispositive that the workings of history had ejected the Hebrew presence in the time of the Romans. What would the Dream do about the non-Hebrew inhabitants of the land, who had been there for centuries if not a millennium? They would be considered to not-exist; the land was to be seen as ‘uninhabited’.

This was – let’s face it – kinda harsh, but the Dream considered that the Hebrews themselves had been treated kind of harshly since the Romans’ time, and that in History what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Then came the Holocaust. Although immediately after the war it did not capture the world’s sustained prioritized attention, it had created – very understandably – a tremendously increased impetus for a Jewish state. ‘A’ Jewish state and a return to ‘the’ long-lost ancestral Biblical homeland fused together in the Dream.

And the land was taken and the return was made and the State was erected. And whatever wildlife was found abroad on the property was subdued when it wasn’t otherwise removed.

That, one might say, was the original sin fused into the soul of that State at its founding; although it cannot be discounted that Hitler’s Holocaust was itself an almost-original sin (no government had ever tried such a thing before) that could not but galvanize any persons of good will.

America – Harry Truman had a tough election to win – was only one of the Western nations that acknowledged the State. And the State, hugely techy and spikey, immediately set about insuring its own and its people’s security, continuation and prosperity. Nothing would be allowed to interfere with that programme. Nothing.

In 1961 the State of Israel committed what was technically an act of war by going to Argentina and kidnapping one of its citizens, the former Nazi Adolf Eichmann. The Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, shrewdly, feared that a new generation of Israeli youth were coming of age having no personal experience of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. A refresher course was needed. Eichmann was grabbed by a covert government kidnapping team, smuggled out of the country in an aircraft, and brought back to Israel for a well-publicized trial that resulted – to nobody’s surprise – in his execution.

In the summer of 1963 JFK had been contemplating a bit of a tilt toward the Arabs, possibly after taking a look at the ’63 Detroit line-up and realizing that a country that was putting out cars like this would need to be pretty friendly with folks who owned a lot of oil (America’s own domestic production was already falling off and within a few years would no longer supply the majority of the nation’s oil needs). But then JFK was gone.

LBJ found himself closer to Truman’s dilemma. He and the entire Democratic Party leadership was in a state of shock when, having guaranteed themselves the loss of the entire voting South by signing the Civil Rights Act in the summer of 1965, and looking forward to the busy consolations of building up ‘the negro’ to replace the Southrons, they were instead confronted only a few days later by the Watts riots, televised as fully as Vietnam, including a large number of ‘spokesmen’ who felt that Dr. King and his ways were treason to the pain of the black people and that nothing short of revolution against whitey would assuage their situation.

A politician faced with a shock like that, on top of a Vietnam conflict burgeoning into a war, would be thinking of nailing down some solid votes. Jewish votes would have been tempting; the oil-gasoline problem would have to wait. LBJ invested the State of Israel as an ‘ally’ pretty much on his own. Democrats in Congress were not disposed to disagree.

In the later Sixties, after the incident with the USS Liberty, Hitler’s extermination of the Jews [and I do not like that slang term for ‘Jewish people’] started to morph into ‘The Holocaust’ as we know it today.

The emphasis was on the ‘outrage’ of Jewish ‘victimization’. Which was true enough and logical enough historically, but also – a neat two-fer – served to bathe the current Israeli State of the late-Sixties in the aura of victimhood. And for victims one can only feel pity, and respect, and sympathetic outrage.

And later on, but not much later on, a further corollary started to surface: ‘victimization’ justifies all. To prevent a repeat of the utterly unique horror of the Holocaust, nothing – NOTHING – must be allowed to interfere and EVERYTHING is allowable. Again, it’s very understandable. But it took a while for it to become clear just exactly how much that apparently decent sentiment allowed.

But by then, as has been discussed in other Posts, the nascent domestic American Advocacies were seeking to further the cause of assorted Identities and were being eagerly courted by the Democrats in their desperate search for replacement voters. The Advoacacies – probably through their PR folks – started to deploy the Israeli gameplan in the service of their own agendas and programmes.

Thus what has now become the classic paradigm: a) there is a unique and outrageous horror b) perpetrated by horrible and outrageous perpetrators c) that is victimizing many victims and d) that is so bad that anything can and must be done to stop it/them and e) this must be stopped and the perpetrators dealt with immediately and e) hesitation or obstruction under the rubrics of ‘deliberation’ or ‘due process’ is a second victimization of the victims and constitutes a crime in itself and f) even to question the rightness of any actions taken to address this outrage is an outrage since g) the rightness of any actions taken against the outrage is to be taken as self-evident and h) even to allow the accused to present their case constitutes a disrespect for the ‘victims’ and intolerably grants the benefit of publicity to the perpetrator(s) because i) what they have done is so horrible that they have forfeited any moral authority or rights or standing, and consequently j) only the correct attitudes are to be publicly allowed and only persons with reliably correct attitudes are to be permitted to comment in the media.

Now it doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to see that this gameplan is technically comprehensive, hugely efficient, and hell-and-gone from democratic process. It is also the direct replicant of the propaganda procedures of those massive early-20th century upheavals: Fascism and revolutionary Communism.

It would certainly be strange if any Israeli official were to bemoan a United States public rendered hugely more sensitive to ‘victimhood’, more tolerant of any measures taken out of ‘grief’ and ‘outrage’ at ‘perpetrators’ of ‘evil’ and ‘horror’. It would certainly serve the needs and purposes of the Israeli State better than a residual old Yankee caution in foreign affairs or a blue-collar immigrant disdain for anybody who couldn’t ‘save themselves’ or a macho quit-whining-and-get-back-to-work willingness to let bygones be bygones.

And as begins to sound familiar above, the needs and purposes of one of the largest and earliest Advocacies, the feminist revolution, dovetailed nicely. A synergy was created that was later amplified and elaborated.

And even later, after various Advocacies and various victims and various ANYthings were done in the service of ‘closure’ – done to law and jurisprudence and constitutional praxis – then, when 9/11 burst into the American consciousness, it became the perfect pivot point upon which to turn traditional American governmental arrangements and foreign-policy upside down. Just as the Holocaust was a “unique” horror and outrage, so too “9/11 changed everything”. And after a while We began to find out just how much of a ‘change’ that ‘everything’ constituted. We still haven’t found out the whole story.

So a lot of what’s gone on since that June 40 years ago had its beginnings back then.

Conceptually, it’s another example of how distinct and separate forces and elements, operating in disparate circumstances, can sometimes create a synergy and if the conditions are right can sustain it.

Original sins are called that for a reason: they are blended in at the very beginning, and if not quickly and honestly addressed, will begin to deform the warp and woof of their host’s spirit and soul: be that host an individual or a nation, be that host an oppressor or an aggrieved – it makes no difference. And as time goes on, and layer upon layer of historical acts are overlaid upon it, that sin becomes part of the very fabric of the host.

Against this monstrous invasion no spirit and no soul can retain its integrity unaided. Yet no State can admit of any Power Higher than itself. We have seen here the Bushist solution to that conundrum: the adoption of a fundamentalistic identification (constituting a functional idolatry) between God and the government. Whatever an American government does is God’s will because God ‘chose’ America.

Whether the Israeli State saw the need to allow its own matters to progress to the point where the State’s relationship to God was a matter for public display is beyond my ken. Perhaps the population of Israel is so familiar with its scriptures that such a connection would be presumed; or its precise implications debated.

Over here, the Bushists had to turn the Fundys loose in the media to mobilize that ‘base’. And to familiarize the larger public with the terms and visions by which the Imperium would seek to justify itself and its actions. And overturn longstanding American arrangements as to Constitutional checks-and-balances, government respect for a broad array of the citizens’ civil rights, the waging of aggressive war, and the use of torture as a matter of policy.

God has kept His opinion – and his judgment - to Himself so far. Unless current American failings in Iraq constitute the first drops of a long and hard rain.

So much set in motion on that afternoon 40 years ago, when the US government let itself be attacked again and again and let its own servicemen be machine-gunned in their life-rafts, and then covered it all up with the help of obedient senior officers and military lawyers.

There should be a Day for them, those sailors of the Liberty. No official wreaths were laid on their graves in Arlington, I bet.

But there is more important work to be done. What they died for is now under grave threat from the very dynamics loosed upon Us that day. We must ensure that they did not die in vain. They need not be ‘avenged’; rather they must be ‘justified’, their lives and deaths given meaning by Our increased devotion to that Cause that Washington began and Lincoln preserved. The world needs no more blood. It desperately needs courage and Truth. Cowardice and untruth are killing it.