An essay in search of justice: Digging Up Truth with a Teaspoon

By John Grant

When he ran for president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte was a brown-skinned Donald Trump shooting from the hip to excite populist mob support for his presidential candidacy. Once in office, he followed up on his bloodthirsty rhetoric by encouraging a death-squad sweep through the island nation that has so far accounted for over two thousands assassinations or executions, whichever term one likes. Reports describe bodies appearing in the streets every morning with signs attached to them suggesting they were drug addicts or dealers -- gruesome echoes from the late 70s and early 80s in El Salvador. Dubbed Dirty Harry in the tabloids, President Duterte applauds the piling up of corpses and deems his program a success because drug users are turning themselves in in droves, lest they be murdered. They end up jammed into overcrowded hell-holes. Some end up dead anyway.

As the “leader of the free world,” President Obama was touring Asia shilling for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. He was eager to “send a clear message that, as a Pacific nation we [the United States] are here to stay.” He planned on visiting Duterte in the Philippines to scold the new leader on his murderous campaign, but he canceled that visit when Duterte gave a saliva-spitting speech in which he called the president “a son of a whore.” Given his tiny island nation is a client state of the powerful United States, after his insult-riddled speech, the volatile Filipino president reportedly began to suffer painful migraine headaches. President Duterte has apparently called many people “a son of a whore,” including the Pope; and whilehijo de puta in Spanish as spoken in the Philippines means son of a whore, it’s such a common expression it probably should be translated into English as son of a bitch. A prudent, cool-headed Obama shook off the choice insult. That is, he didn’t respond by calling Mr. Duterte a fish-eating wog or a psychopathic lunatic. Instead, the two men “exchanged pleasantries” at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Vientiane, Laos.

The hijo de puta flap fortunately did not overshadow the really important news from Obama’s Asian trip, namely that the President of the United States of America “acknowledged” (he pointedly did not apologize for) the U.S. bombing of Laosbetween 1964 and 1973. “Villages and entire valleys were obliterated,” Obama said. “Countless civilians were killed.” The adjective innocent should have been added between the wordscountless and civilians. (The U.S. dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos; the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years.) What the U.S. rained down on Laotian peasantry has been described as, per capita, the heaviest bombing campaign in world history. This is one of many bloody military secrets in our archives; these archives have been open for some years, but the bombing is still not recognized by most Americans for the evil it was. For years, our government kept the secret from Americans; it was obviously never a secret to the Laotian people...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3285