[Salon] UK spy agencies under scrutiny over torture of Saudi men by CIA | Middle East Eye

Todd Pierce <todd.e.pierce@icloud.com> · Fri, 2 Jun 2023 11:28:10 -0500

As a follow-up to this article which Chas shared earlier,

I worked on the Hawsawi defense team for a little over a year before I had to retire as a JAG Officer at the end of 2012. I won’t say much about it for what should be obvious reasons and I deliberately looked at very little Top-Secret information. Only enough to get a “glimpse” of their motivation. Which I already knew from the appellate team I was on, and remain on, the case of al Bahlul, and also from the other case I was on for 4 years, Ibrahim al Qosi. I don’t need to reveal any classified information in saying that they did not “hate us for our freedom,” which was the Republican mantra. Especially from its most radical fanatics, such as Trump’s one-time AG Jeff Sessions. Whom at least one “Traditional Conservative” here had expressed the hope after Trump was elected that he would appoint Sessions to a high position in the administration. Which Trump did, as AG (though that did not last long, for “personal” reasons, not policy disagreements, as both were fully in accord on Islamophobia, and of the “need” for casual cruelty in the treatment of anyone who "threatens” the “consensus,” in Traditional Conservative Willmoore Kendall’s choice of words, of America). As is so celebrated today  today by “Traditonal Conservatives” in the Trump, and/or, DeSantis Camps. 

With this explaining that popularity, of Sessions, and Trump, DeSantis, and the rest of the “New Right,” coalesced around them: https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/factsheet-jeff-sessions/

I’m not revealing any classified information by pointing out that this work required the study of “actual” historians (not the “Revisionist Historians of Regnery Publishing, so beloved by The American Conservative magazine today), to include Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, and other Israeli “New Historians," such as Avi Shlaim, and on U.S. foreign policy: Chas Freeman. And not long after I arrived in DC, and was introduced to a Committee for the Republic salon, and joined this email list, I became well acquainted with Bill Polk’s work on the subject of Mideast history (and nuclear war), and studied his written works, and in person, his direct teaching. Like a Graduate Seminar in my visits with him at his home in France. 

As I have been extremely harsh (I hope people see me as) in my judgment of Conservative “Revisionist Historians” working as Hillsdale College professors and The American Conservative magazine's editors in particular (see one of their latest on the “benign” treatment of European colonialists), to name just two, my own approach to the study of history, whether as a JAG Officer, or Gradute Student most recently, or as a critic here of the celebrants of “Goldwaterist (Fanatical) Militarism," is in accord with Avi Schlaim’s, and Bill Polk’s, which is described on Schlaim’s Wikipedia page as: "the historian's most fundamental task is not to chronicle but to evaluate... to subject the claims of all the protagonists to rigorous scrutiny and reject all those claims, however deeply cherished, that do not stand up.” In the case of the historians I name positively above, their claims on Mideast history did stand up. 

All that was lacking was a more in-depth explanation of “why” people turned to “political violence,” whether called “terrorism,” or World War. We “know” why the U.S. went to war against Japan in 1941: they attacked us. But that doesn’t explain the "cognitive effect” upon our population for why we would "demand war.” And why some “Muslims” would support hostilities against the U.S. for what astute historians recognized as the horrendous effects of colonialism, and so-called "post-colonialism,” when the U.S. created its “Pointillist Empire,” (https://thediplomat.com/tag/the-pointillist-empire/) in full after WW II. With the harshest brutality possible by the U.S. when “State Terrorism” was “necessary” to keep its Empire in line. Or at least attempt to (Vietnam a notable failure), as with Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, et al. But as graffiti still on the walls in West Belfast states: “Oppression Breeds Resistance” (https://www.palestineposterproject.org/poster/oppression-breeds-resistance-falls-road) which we’re increasingly encountering as we continue to attempt to extend U.S. hegemony over the World, per the Cheney Doctrine, which Trump expanded and accelerated the “coercion” which is necessary for “enforcement” of such: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/08/trump-military-defense-industry-booster-410396

And U.S. oppression in the Mideast, whether direct, or less so with our Saudi proxies who permitted the U.S. to set up a series of military logistics bases there, as I was inolved in following Gulf War I,  to include for use to repress any internal resistance to that regime, or as launchpads for future U.S. wars in the Mideast, as we would see, “Bred Resistance.” Beginning even before the “War” was over, assuming the men who drove up to our security gate and leveled guns at our guards in Dammam, and later blew up Khobar Towers, were related to al Qaeda. All this material below is really just a furtherance of what Carl von Clausewitz began his study of “War” on, and the principle he stated that “War is Never an Isolated Act,” so it is all relevant to today’s world of U.S. Perpetual War and the inevitable consequence of “Blowback” as Chalmers Johnson called it, or the “Boomerang Effect” per Hannah Arendt, and explaining the “motivation” of al Qaeda, and the “causality” of our Perpetual war. Needless to say, “Oppression Breeds Resistance” is related to “Fascism Breeds Resistance,” as Palestinians know of what is openly called “Fascism” by more astute Israelis in Israel now, for which the Palestinians feel oppression everyday, for which Trump, DeSantis, and the U.S. “New Right” are co-belligerents/co-sponsors of. 