Unconscionable: How the World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations

By Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett

"UNCONSCIONABLE" by Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is a Patriot's View as Others See. The book shines light on the wrongheaded and immoral nature of US foreign relations policy and practice. Published by Xlibris and released at Rochester, N.Y. (PRWEB) August 29, 2014: "Acts committed by and/or in the name of one's homeland must be of concern to inhabitants of that land it is their duty to be concerned and engaged," Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett says in expressing the relevance of her work.

"UNCONSCIONABLE" lays out a view of what is and what should be, what is wrong and what is better. In six map-illustrated chapters, this work of nonfiction documents U.S. foreign relations as global, unprovoked and unchecked violence. As it is also a hope for change, the work not only comments on significance and repercussions of the current state of affairs, it offers corrective measures. As the work of a veteran educator, its ending sections further instruct with reference tools of extensive sources and notes, appendices and index covering contributors and background material, international principles and conventions; and components of the great body to which the book is dedicated, the 193-member-states United Nations.

Dr. Bennett takes a world view as articulated by others in independent, alternative print and broadcast sources, offering especially American readers an unfiltered, oft unseen perspective on how the rest of the world sees U.S. relations with the world's peoples. The hope Bennett ventures is that "if we (Americans) see ourselves as others see us, we will be moved to change our ways for the better."

"UNCONSCIONABLE"
By Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett
Hardcover | 6 x 9in | 306 pages | ISBN 9781499043143
Softcover | 6 x 9in | 306 pages | ISBN 9781499043150
E-Book | 306 pages | ISBN 9781499043136
Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the Author

Dr. Carolyn L. Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs. A lifelong American writer and writer/activist, her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of US foreign relations; matters of geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, violence and nonviolence.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499043136

Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett

Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is a lifelong nonfiction writer with interests in politics, public affairs and international relations. Her worldview is informed by her U.S. Peace Corps years teaching in West Africa and engaging with native peoples and multinational expatriates. Bennett's ethics and humanity are fundamentally informed by her formative years growing up with parents in the U.S. South and in later years traveling across the United States and to some countries of Western Europe. Having a belief in basic values of nonviolence, sovereignty of all nations and rights of all peoples to protections under law and universal conventions, she has become increasingly alarmed not by foreign threats but by internally-rooted threats to global society -- Americans' proud domestic and international code of violence manifest in endless wars and fighting words; their excused pandering, entrenched viciousness, and incompetence of public officials who have severely damaged America's world standing and virtually destroyed any vision of The Union. Bennett's teaching and government experience, her credentials in educational philosophy and ethics, teaching and learning theories, journalism and public affairs (Michigan State University, PhD; American University, MA) make hers the heart of an educator who delights in sharing ideas. Her major published include: Alphabetic SOLUTIONS (2016); Unconscionable: How the World Sees Us (2014); No Land an Island: No People Apart (2012); Same Ole or Something New (2010); Breakdown (2009); Women's Work and Words Altering World Order (2008); Missing News and Views in Paranoid Times (2006); No Room for Despair . . . Mary McLeod Bethune's Cold War, Integration-Era Commentary (2005); Talking Back to Today's News (2003); America's Human Connection (1994); An Annotated Bibliography of Mary McLeod Bethune's Chicago Defender Columns, 1948 -1955 (2001); and You Can Struggle without Hating, Fight without Violence (1988). Links: Xlibris dot com; Today's Insight News (http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/), https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett; authorswork@gmail or [e-mail]

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Copyright © 2014 by Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett.

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The author claims copyright in and responsibility for the text in this volume: editing and compilation, excerpting and new material, but claims no copyright in original text of other authors or in any exterior or interior images including but not limited to maps and photographs. She gratefully acknowledges contributions of Worldatlas and the Xlibris team. See full listing in Acknowledgments, Permissions, Credits section of this work.

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CONTENTS

I First Words of a Patriot

II U.S. Aggression against the World

III Unspeakably Cruel How Foreign Sources See U.S. Foreign Relations

IV Unspeakably Cruel KILLER Drones

V Unconscionable Acts Unconscionable Consequences Divide, Enslave, Destroy, Ricochet

VI Final Words of a Patriot

Acknowledgments, Permissions, Credits

Sources and Notes

Appendices with sources

Appendix A: United Nations (pertinent overview)

Appendix B: Chemical Weapons Convention

Appendix C: Rights of the Child Convention

Appendix D: International Human Rights Declaration

Appendix E: Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Appendix F: TBIJ—The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (Naming the Dead)

Appendix G: Brief Profiles (Chapter Lead-In Figures Quoted)

The Author

DEDICATION

To the evolutionary potential of human existence and to the notion that, one day, the full assembly of nations comprising the United Nations will constitute the defining, nonviolent instrument of deliberation and relations among all nations of the world.

I

First Words of a Patriot

I look upon true patriotism as the brotherhood of man and the service of all to all.

— United States author, political activist Helen Keller (1880–1968)

Dissent is patriotic, the saying goes; but it is more than an act of patriotism. We use words too loosely these days; perhaps we always have when it was expedient to do so. But dissent is imperative. It is imperative to save the nation, to save this idea and help it rise to its highest and best potential. A country cannot rise when its leaders, advised by the same characters, are committing the same acts over and over again—repeating the same inhumane mistakes, operating in the same corrupt ways. Hearing the ideas of a singular voice is a lot like incest. It causes breakdown, regress, insanity.

Regardless to its cause or motive, there is backwardness inscribed in U.S. relations with the world that must be exposed and reversed. Backwardness causes interminable breakdown. You need only observe, even cursorily, the conditions of people, people relations, and institutions within the United States together with the carnage U.S. policies and practices leave in other countries of the Americas as well as in Africa and Asia and Europe.

Dissent saves the country from total madness and the destruction of all it touches. And if the powers currently in place want to chop off our heads for dissenting from their course in barbarism, we had better hope to have seeded fertile ground from which generations of new dissenters may grow. Because the brilliant idea that was America (and I do not forget Native American or African)—free from the king and one nation indivisible with freedom and justice for all—is far from fulfilling its promise and rising to its potential.

Dissent: A Lover’s Duty

I love America, have always loved her, and have never felt this kind of personal allegiance to any other country. So I cannot accept the notion widely held over relatively recent decades: that there are no more countries, only corporations; that these corporations—aided by handmaiden Neanderthals who interminably occupy public office, aided by servicers of private interests who constantly revolve in and out of public and private sectors—rule the world.

Political activist and author Helen Keller, writing in the early twentieth century, spoke for me when she said, "I look upon true patriotism as the brotherhood of man [humankind comprised of men, women, children] and the service of all to all." But a state of affairs in which men (mostly men) selfishly and cynically sacrifice the public interest to private interests is the very definition of unpatriotic when patriotic defines those who love their country. The current state of affairs sacrifices the country’s domestic and international imperatives as to care and character and common good to private, selfish, narrow interests. Government officials pledge their allegiance to private corporate interests and, worse than the kings of old, they comprise an egomaniacal cabal, an oppressive plutocracy that threatens not only the United States of America but also the whole world. The patriot’s dissent can end this occupation, stymie this insidious takeover, and perhaps reenergize the potential and promise of a great nation.

Whatever Lincoln—Abraham Lincoln, America’s sixteenth president—was or said or did, when I have read his biographies and when I hear in my head American poet and historian Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln, I see Lincoln as a dissenter who loved and was intent on preserving the still-forming Union, as etched in the 1787 Constitution of the United States of America. Lincoln was concerned not with factional unions, but The Union—the United States of America, whose potential was merely seeding. But in our modern age of gadgetry and unbridled consumption, politicians crack wise while watching video images of military helicopters killing civilians or Internet traffic that traffics in human beings, existing in an anonymity that serializes bigotry and legitimates hate. The plutocracy’s use of international sanctions to incite animosity and set groups violently against one another is the overt form of a more insidious tactic of using ever-present handheld gadgetry to encourage insensibility, instill fear and paranoia, separate neighbor from neighbor, and sever the Union.

Among the most applauded and maligned dissenters of the past few years has been Edward Snowden. Edward Joseph Snowden is a thirty-one-year-old U.S. citizen and a whistleblower that top U.S. officials have crudely labeled every disparaging term they can think of. Now exiled in Russia, Edward Snowden was a U.S. computer professional employed by the notorious CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) as a systems administrator, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as a counterintelligence trainer, and then inside the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), by the private intelligence contractor Dell as well as the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Still targeted, slandered, and forced to remain in exile for having exposed the NSA’s sweeping illegal domestic and international surveillance, Snowden spoke in an exclusive interview with NBC News. Since U.S. officials and others with access to media have constantly accused Snowden of being traitorous and unpatriotic, he spoke to the issue of patriotism. And I am in complete agreement with his answers. After affirming his own patriotism, Snowden said that the term patriot has been thrown around so much that it has lost its value. I would go even further to say that—not unlike terrorist and terrorism—patriot and patriotism as used incessantly by contemporary politicians and ideologues are meaningless, mere expediencies, tools of divisiveness. Snowden said being a patriot does not mean putting government service above all else, and he explains this way:

"Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your [fellow citizens] from the violations and encroachments of adversaries. [And] adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries.

They can be bad policies. They can be officials who … need a little bit more accountability. They can be mistakes of government and simple overreach … that should never have been tried or that went wrong."

A true lover of country dissents while embracing. In no way is she secessionist from either country or the world but an idealist who, as I expect was true of the founders, wants the best not only for her country but also from her country, from her compatriots. Our way of being as evidenced in the present state of affairs is far beneath us. We can and must do better. The present course and character of U.S. relations in the world is beneath us. Its policy and practices in foreign relations as I observe them imaged in the words of outsiders, those beyond the Washington beltway, are unconscionable—intended to hurt human beings, to cause and/or exacerbate suffering. This character and course in foreign relations teaches unspeakable cruelty to America’s young at home and maims young military recruits who commit the unconscionable in endless wars ordered by a plutocracy that pours propaganda over the masses, licks their blood-soaked fangs, and presses on. Counting their McKinley(s), Cleveland(s) and Madison(s) squirreled away in some Swiss-like financial establishment, they, the plutocrats, are the insidiously secessionist.

America’s masses for at least sixty years have heightened the shrill of their distraction with their own publicly feuded personal, self-centered stuff: reproduction, marriage, big-box products and upgrades. Their leaders, in covert and not so covert ways, have—while latching onto this stuff—carved a swath of blood right the way across Asia, Africa, and Europe as well as the United States of America. Often this bloodbath manifests in the destruction of essential institutions of law and education and health and welfare and relations among people. This is unconscionable.

Killing: Varieties of the Unconscionable

Killing is unconscionable, and getting away with murder is unspeakably unconscionable. The exceptionalism touted by the U.S. cabal when describing the United States is not only delusional, it is misleading. At its core, the claim of exceptionalism is a claim of exemption, exception—everybody except us—made clear in the singling out of Africa’s heads of state and leaders in Islamic countries, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East for demonization, abduction and assassination, kangaroo courts, public hangings, and command appearances before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Never has a prosecutorial or judicial process called heads of state or leaders in Western or Western-leaning countries to account for their high crimes: clearly and objectively documented murder, abduction and assassination, ethnic cleansing, torture, and an endless list of national sovereignty and human rights violations. Getting away with murder is the true face of exceptionalism, and it is unconscionable.

In the context in which I am writing, there are dimensions and manifestations of the unconscionable, and central to all of them is killing: the conscienceless causation of suffering evident and deeply abhorrent in U.S. foreign-relations policy and practices. I am aware that one can always make arguments about the act of killing, and I am willing to acknowledge those. Was it in self-defense? Was America threatened? Was it premeditated? Was it an act of passion or provoked? None of these apply. No one connected substantively with the Conscience, the faculty that instructs good, an inner voice (not of man’s religions, gods or ghosts) that judges right and wrong, can decide impartially that the foreign-relations policy of the United States is moral or legal, just, justified or right. No one even marginally conscious of a vital connectedness with the universe and humankind, a sense of oneself as coequal among equals—not as the deluded exceptional—can look at U.S. relations in the world and judge it as anything other than unconscionable.

Though popular songs and religious texts made by men might claim a time for everything under the sun including a time to kill, I do not believe this time, our time, is the time to kill; nor has it been a time to kill for as long as I can remember. Moreover, I do not believe killing should ever be the first thought or even, in the plutocrats’ mantra, an option perpetually on the table. I do not believe kill (violence, destruction) should ever be uppermost in the mind.

And while I grant non-fabricated self defense, I can recall no time in documented history of the developing United States of America that the country has been threatened except during the 1800s secessionist period, a domestic malady resurging two hundred years later because a nation enmeshed in perpetual violence abroad deserts its own and expands the levels and manifestations of killing. Longtime analyst and columnist Craig Roberts declared in a May 19, 2014, piece posted at Press TV that in the United States patriotism has become synonymous with militarism. But of the 201 overseas military operations conducted by the United States from the end of the Second World War into the new millennium, not a single one of these wars and military operations had anything whatsoever to do with defending the U.S. population from foreign threats. In this century, Roberts writes, Americans’ worst enemies are not al-Qaeda, Iran, Russia, and China but our own presidents who have declared repeatedly that the orchestrated ‘war on terror’ gives them the right to set aside the civil liberties guaranteed to every citizen by the U.S. Constitution.

Inflicting the blow or bomb that results in the death of a human body is horrible but is not the whole manifestation of the unconscionable. The dimensions and manifestations of the unconscionable, killing, take a variety of forms—which are far-reaching, reproducing, compounding, and contagious. Provoking and destabilizing, driving a wedge, kills something valuable, often established over generations or in progress toward mending. Killing destroys the immediately tangible: lives, homes, livelihoods; but killing the young, the innocents, also kills the future. Killing manifests itself in the rupture of relations among varieties of sects, kin, and kind—among countries, states, and regions. The spirit of the killer nation—soldier, remote, or on the ground—descends into barbarism and is itself destroyed.

Having disestablished public education and its teachings of ethics, independent thinking, and critical thought, unconscionable killing kills the act of reason as it destroys law and civility. If one is able to kill without being subject to law, to kill with impunity, all law breaks down. Even the idea of human rights due to human beings by virtue of being human is utterly destroyed, ripped from domestic statutes and international principles. The soldier returning home from killing by remote or from land, helicopter, or sea—having been personally used, abused, discarded—is scarred mentally, physically, emotionally, and languishes in varieties of isolation and homelessness. Added to insult and injury are politicians’ media adverts promising jobs to these scarred human beings.

One of the saddest fallout stories in recent times was the case of forty-four-year-old PTSD Army veteran Kryn Miner who had left the theaters of war but, as his family told the press, his fight did not end when he left the war; in a way it [had] just [begun]. His tours of duty had carried him to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Panama. According to press reports, Miner had logged eleven deployments and in 2010 had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (also called post-traumatic stress syndrome) and a traumatic brain injury after a bomb blast in Afghanistan threw him into a wall. This was one of nineteen blasts he had endured in a period of twenty years. In 2013, Miner had reportedly attempted suicide. In late April 2014, during a domestic incident in which he reportedly threatened to kill his family, he handed a gun to his young son who inflicted the fatal gunshot, leaving Kryn Miner dead and his family further traumatized. The justice system will not prosecute the child, but this family will never recover. Veterans of the wars are often not only sick, they are unprepared, without extensive mental health services, to perform work in civilian society—not to mention the fact that the current state of economics and employment cannot accommodate them or even skilled, healthy civilian workers and professionals with living wages and meaningful work.

Unconscionable killing is valuing some life and devaluing others, triaging human worth and worthlessness. U.S. law enforcement—on orders from public officials—arrests, assaults, or pushes out of sight a foot-soldiering veteran begging on a corner while a killer military general receives decorated status, takes military pension, luxuriates in the lap of luxury, and/or revolves back and forth through corporate/government doors. U.S. and U.S.-allied governments rob and destroy the homes and lands and farms; unmanned aerial vehicles (U.S. drones) destroy the lives and livelihoods of Somalis, Palestinians and Pakistanis. In a state of affairs worse than the jungle, secret agents hunt down selective heads of state and slaughter them based on rumors, trumped-up charges, and unfounded allegations. For these destroyers and their commanders, no tribunal or legal proceeding convenes; never have they been forced to appear before the International Criminal Court (the death of law). Getting away with murder is to murder law itself. Unconscionable killing kills the possibility of friends, undermines the potential for friendship among nations and peoples, and creates enemies where there were no enemies.

Why do they do it?

Motive and psychology may be important topics in a discussion of such egregious phenomena (some analysts think so); but motive and psychology are not the concern of this book, except for this brief sidebar. I have noticed a strain in personal character and experiential preparedness that runs through the complex manifestations of the unconscionable.

Principal figures in the public sector (though not exclusively the public sector) appear devoid of human sensibility. They are unprepared, inept, compromised, and morally, experientially, intellectually, psychologically unfit for the purpose of leadership whether presidential, legislative, or judiciary. Lights on and cameras rolling, they will say anything—recite lines on cue or read the teleprompter—but they are incompetent for the serious work before them. These weaknesses present a lethal mixture that renders public figures, the offices they hold, the country they serve, and peoples and nations they touch at the mercy of their recklessness. Having said that, what interests me is the observable. Not the underlying motives but the blood these public figures leave flowing in the streets. I am not concerned with whether the character and caliber of U.S. relations with countries of the world rises from a delusional sense of exceptionality or some mad motive to dominate the world and its peoples. I am not concerned with whether petrol or weapons or medals, agricultural and diamond industrialists and/or their paid allies sitting in public office and their lobbyists, consultants, and contractors are bent on cornering markets and padding their own pockets. These are not issues confronting me here. My concern is the observed and observable unconscionable: killing, which, on its face, is unquestionably wrong and must be called to account and stopped.

Reflection outside Limelight: Genesis of Change

I am interested not in celebrities or politicians per se but in issues and ideas. I am an idea activist more than an on-the-street activist, and never a television activist. I believe change—good change, change for the good of all, all across the world—begins in the reflective mind, far from the limelight. Change begins with ideas and sober, clearheaded thinking, which occurs alone and in small groups. Significant rights movements took root in such beginnings, and it takes the same settings and situations to sustain them. That other slogan was right: revolution will not be televised. It also will not happen in the presumed anonymity of plutocrat-monitored online social networking. Constructive change requires serious and sustained reflection among seriously moral, ethical, law-abiding people who care about all and seek to coexist peacefully, nonviolently, among all peoples of the world.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom, says the Chinese philosopher and teacher Confucius. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is imitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest. Attributed to the Roman scholar Marcus Tullius Cicero is the thought that it is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved—but by reflection, force of character, and judgment. We dare not dismiss these lasting insights as mere chatter. Unconscionable is a book of reflective sober ideas and issues-centered reportage outside the main screaming stream that shines light on our America. Three themes underlie this work. True patriots are not perpetrators of violence and destruction. The policy and practice, the character and attitude manifest in U.S. foreign-relations policy and practice is wrong: unlawful, inhuman, unethical, immoral. Any hope of substantive and lasting change will come not from the clever speech of politicians, propaganda, or corporate advertising—but from self-reflection and dissent, difference and differing opinions, from large numbers of people paying careful attention, exposing, and speaking out against the wrongs.

Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett

Author of

No Land an Island No People Apart

and

Unconscionable

II

U.S. Aggression against the World

The United Nations was established in the aftermath of the Second World War to promote international peace and security… . While humanitarian crises continue to emerge and countless lives continue to be lost, there cannot be business as usual.

—Senator the Honorable Maxine McClean, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade of Barbados to the General Debate of the 68th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, September 30, 2013

The world sees U.S. foreign relations (and I see U.S. foreign relations) in an entirely different light than does the average American, given the propaganda peddled 24/7 by people in prominent places. Maybe most Americans do not care, though I find that hard to believe. I care. Not only about how we are seen in the world or that we are seen differently from the way in which we see ourselves, but that we choose not to see what others cannot avoid seeing: the constant unconscionable cruelty perpetrated upon the world in our foreign-relations choices, policies, and practices.

By foreign relations, I mean that which is tangible—the seen, felt, heard act and character of U.S. presence