ANONYMOUS: "We Do Not Forgive, We Do Not Forget" & Nor Should You

NEW REVELATIONS : Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex & The Absolute Psychosis Of Some.....

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." -President Dwight D. Eisenhower

THE SEEDS: ( 1st correspondence between President Eisenhower's assistants).

"The White House
Washington
April 5, 1960

Memorandum To: Mac Moos

As the time for the President’s (Eisenhower) retirement draws near, I recommend to your re-reading the “Farewell Address” of George Washington. It is a beautifully wise and modest piece by a faithful public servant who loved his country.

I was struck by its relevance to our day: the call for Constitutional obedience; the warnings about sectionalism; the dangers of “over grown military establishments” but the necessity of maintaining a “respectable defensive posture.” the realistic attitude “that the love of power and the proneness to abuse it which dominate the human heart”; the unhappy tendency of mankind “to seek security and repose in the absolute of power of an individual”; the necessity for an enlightened public opinion; the ungenerous habit of one generation to spend beyond its means and to throw “upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear”; the broad diplomatic advice. And much more.

This address could furnish some fine ammunition over the year and perhaps serve as a guide for a final statement in January 1961? "

Frederic Fox"

THE DISCOVERY:

A few months ago, Grant Moos was closing his boathouse, near Hackensack, Minnesota, as he does every summer, tying up loose ends, sweeping up debris. This year, though, his sister Kathy insisted that it was finally time to do something about six cardboard boxes that for decades had been stacked in a corner next to a 7.5-horsepower Evinrude engine.

The boxes belonged to their father, Malcolm Moos, a journalist and academic who was a speechwriter for President Dwight Eisenhower. When Moos left the White House, in 1961, he donated some of his papers to the Eisenhower Presidential Library, in Abilene, Kansas, but he kept some, too.

The boxes were full of pine needles, acorns, and mouse droppings, and smelled of campfires. As Moos looked through the contents, he came across a batch of folders marked “Farewell Address.” He looked up the Eisenhower Library, and sent the boxes off to Abilene.

At first, the library did not know what it had. As archivists began to go through the papers, however, they discovered a trove of drafts, memos, and research materials that had long been missing from the record of one of the twentieth century’s most important speeches. For fifty years, Americans have regarded Eisenhower’s Farewell Address with a mixture of awe and bewilderment.

Speaking three nights before the end of his Presidency, in 1961, Eisenhower warned of a “scientific-technological élite” that would dominate public policy, and of a “military-industrial complex” that would claim “our toil, resources, and livelihood.”

In the decades since, Eisenhower’s warning has seemed prescient. The convergence of American military might and a powerful arms industry has characterized wars from Vietnam to Iraq, and the web of power that he described seems present in American society today. Still, generations have wondered what prompted the most celebrated general of the Second World War to leave the White House with a warning about the military. Eisenhower’s grandson David writes in a new memoir that Ike “developed a kind of split personality about the most controversial speech of his life,” downplaying its significance to old military and business friends while professing pride in it to others.

Some historians have regarded the Farewell Address as an afterthought, hastily composed at the end of 1960 as an adjunct to the 1961 State of the Union. Others have regarded it as the soulful expression of an aging President who was determined to warn the American people of dangers ahead. But the Moos papers make clear that the address, far from being an afterthought, was among the most deliberate speeches of Eisenhower’s Presidency. Regarded in his day as inarticulate and detached, Eisenhower in these papers is fully engaged, grappling with the language of the text and the radical questions that it raised.

Contrary to what some historians have speculated, it was not Moos or his assistant, Ralph Williams, who suggested a farewell address. On May 20, 1959, Moos was meeting with the President, when Eisenhower proposed an idea for “one speech he would like very much to make.” It was to be, Moos recorded, “a ten-minute farewell address to the Congress and the American people.” Moos deemed the idea “brilliant” and began making notes.

Eisenhower was a rigorous editor. Major speeches such as the State of the Union might be refined ten or twelve times. Even by those standards, however, the Farewell Address was special. Eisenhower personally rewrote the opening passages, and his brother Milton overhauled the entire speech. It was batted back and forth for months; in the end, it underwent twenty-nine drafts (21 previously unknown drafts were found in the boathouse papers).

The papers also debunk a myth. Some historians have credited Norman Cousins, the editor of The Saturday Review, with helping to shape the speech, in December of 1960. It’s true that Cousins called the President on December 14th, but “the idea of trying to get anyone like Norman Cousins working on it would be dreadful,” Eisenhower’s secretary wrote to Moos. “How in the world do we diplomatically thank him, but say No?”

One core idea dominates every version: the first draft described “the conjunction of a large and permanent military establishment and a large and permanent arms industry.” Policing it would require “all the organizing genius we possess” to insure “that liberty and security are both well served.” It added:

“We must be especially careful to avoid measures which would enable any segment of this vast military-industrial complex to sharpen the focus of its power.”

Through scores of revisions, that idea persisted. As delivered, the speech memorably read, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

At the library, the staff is ecstatic about the find. Karl Weissenbach, the director, predicted that the new documents will “change the history and interpretation of the most famous farewell address in American history.”

It’s also a reminder of the contingency of historical research. Had Moos vacationed in Florida rather than in Minnesota, the documents might have disintegrated. Instead, the memos and drafts survived, snug in a boathouse corner, rejoining history just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s address.

THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS HERE

CREDITS:

- Memo from (Eisenhower's chief speech writer) Malcolm Moos to ( Staff Assistant to the President) Frederic Fox re: the content of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s future Farewell Address: " Military-Industrial Complex" Speech, 1960. Article: -Jim Newton, Ike’s Speech, New Yorker Magazine, 12.10.10. Image: President Dwight D. Eisenhower's handwritten edits of final speech, NARA, 1960).

Every Government Is Run By Liars: Fairy Tales from High Places Does The Trick...

"Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice. If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration." -Chris Hedges, 11. 29. 2010.

"Compared to the kind of secret cables that WikiLeaks has just shared with the world, everyday public statements from government officials are exercises in make-believe. In a democracy, people have a right to know what their government is actually doing.

In a pseudo-democracy, a bunch of fairy tales from high places will do the trick.

Diplomatic facades routinely masquerade as realities. But sometimes the mask slips -- for all the world to see -- and that's what just happened with the humongous leak of State Department cables:

"Every government is run by liars," independent journalist I.F. Stone observed, "and nothing they say should be believed." The extent and gravity of the lying varies from one government to another -- but no pronouncements from world capitals should be taken on faith.

By its own account, the U.S. government has been at war for more than nine years now and there's no end in sight. Like the Pentagon, the State Department is serving the overall priorities of the warfare state. The nation's military and diplomacy are moving parts of the same vast war machinery. Such a contraption requires a muscular bodyguard of partial truths, deceptions and outright lies. With the USA's ongoing war efforts at full throttle, the contradictions between public rationales and hidden goals -- or between lofty rhetoric and grisly human consequences -- cannot stand the light of day.

Details of Washington's transactional alliances with murderous dictators, corrupt tyrants, warlords and drug traffickers are among its most closely guarded quasi-secrets. Most media accounts can be blown off by officialdom, but smoking-gun diplomatic cables are harder to ignore. With its massive and unending reliance on military force -- with a result of more and more carnage, leaving behind immense grief and rage in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere -- the U.S. government has colossal gaps to bridge between its public-relations storylines and its war-making realities.

The same government that devotes tremendous resources to inflicting military violence abroad must tout its humane bona fides and laudable priorities to the folks back home. But that essential PR task becomes more difficult when official documents to the contrary keep leaking. No government wants to face documentation of actual policies, goals and priorities that directly contradict its public claims of virtue. In societies with democratic freedoms, the governments that have the most to fear from such disclosures are the ones that have been doing the most lying to their own people.

The recent mega-leaks are especially jarring because of the extreme contrasts between the U.S. government's public pretenses and real-life actions. But the standard official response is to blame the leaking messengers.

"We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information," the White House said on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph Lieberman denounced "an outrageous, reckless and despicable action that will undermine the ability of our government and our partners to keep our people safe and to work together to defend our vital interests." For good measure, he twittered: "WikiLeaks' deliberate disclosure of these diplomatic cables is nothing less than an attack on our national security."

But what kind of "NATIONAL SECURITY" can be built on duplicity from a government that is discredited and refuted by its own documents?

CREDITS:

Norman Solomon (“WikiLeaks: Demystifying “Diplomacy,” CommonDreams.org, 11.29.2010. Image: Artwork for the Stephen King Dark Tower series: The Crimson King).

HISTORY REPEATING: U.S. Justice & The CIA - American Angels Of Death...

"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it." Dr. Josef Mengele (1945 ).

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that physicians with the CIA's Office of Medical Services (OMS) played an even greater role in facilitating the torture of detainees than was previously recognized.

As described in the study, "In 2003, partially in response to a CIA Inspector General investigation that questioned the use of enhanced interrogation methods and criticized the agency’s failure to consult with OMS about the risks to detainees of waterboarding, OMS physicians assumed another role, providing opinions to the agency and lawyers whether the techniques used would be expected to cause severe pain or suffering and thus constitute torture."

This advisory function came in addition to the physicians' previous involvement in the torture of detainees through performing medical evaluations before and after interrogation, monitoring waterboarding sessions, and collecting information on the effectiveness and risks of various techniques.

The study, titled "Roles of CIA Physicians in Enhanced Interrogation and Torture of Detainees," was authored by Leonard S. Rubinstein, the president of Physicians for Human Rights, and Brig. Gen. (ret.) Stephen N. Xenakis, a former Army psychiatrist who is now with the Center for Public Health and Human Rights. It is based on a previously secret document from 2004, laying out OMS guidelines for detainee interrogation, which was released by the Obama administration.

In an article for Harper's, human rights lawyer Scott Horton notes that the JAMA study makes it apparent that the OMS physicians did not merely offer a medical opinion as to what constituted torture:

"gave their bosses exactly what was expected of them: a green light to torture."

The study emphasizes that even though OMS approved the use of enhanced interrogation methods subject to "medical limitations," those limitations took no account of actual pain and suffering and were merely calculated to minimize the chances of doing permanent physical damage.

They "included durational limits for exposure to a specified temperature, either up to the time hypothermia would be expected to develop or on evidence of hypothermia; body weight loss of 10% or evidence of significant malnutrition as a result of dietary restrictions; and exposure to noise just under the decibel levels associated with permanent hearing loss. Stress positions were permitted for up to 48 hours provided the detainee’s hands were no higher than the head, weight was borne by lower extremities, and preexisting injuries were not aggravated. ... The OMS guidelines also advised that emergency resuscitation equipment be available when waterboarding was used."

Although the guidelines specify they: "the detainee's physical condition must be such that these interventions will not have lasting effect," they IGNORE professional literature on the potential health risks of the techniques, citing instead such sources as "'Wilderness Medicine' 4th Ed., Ch 6 -- Accidental Hypothermia."
"The duplicity in this affair is amazingly circular.," Horton writes. "The Justice Department’s torture lawyers relied on the CIA’s torture doctors for the conclusion that specific techniques did not produce 'severe pain' that ran afoul of the criminal law prohibition on torture; the CIA doctors relied on the Justice Department lawyers for the same conclusion. It looks like a compact, and an alert prosecutor would no doubt call it... A JOINT CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE. It’s hard to see at this point whose behavior was the more ethically odious, though evidence suggests that both engaged in professional misconduct so egregious as to warrant formal disciplinary proceedings."

"The torture doctors expect to have their identities protected, and thus to ESCAPE the natural consequences of their gross professional misconduct," Horton concludes: "This helps us understand why senior figures in the intelligence community are today ferociously pressuring the Justice Department to criminalize anyone who attempts to discover the identities of those involved. They assert that those identified would be terrorist targets. In fact, those who are unmasked face likely professional ethics proceedings, as well as the long-term risk of criminal prosecution, particularly if they ever venture beyond the borders of the United States."

-Muriel Kane (Study: CIA doctors ‘gave green light to torture’,RawStory.com, 8.5.2010. Image: Dr. Josef Mengele in his laboratory, 1945 ).