Here’s What the Media Isn’t Telling You About the Venezuelan Election

by BreakThrough News / July 31st, 2024

“The media is lying to you about the Venezuelan election,” begins
BreakThrough News reporter about what is undeniably another US-sponsored coup to try and overthrow the Venezuelan people’s desire as expressed through an election.

BreakThrough News is a nonprofit media that tells the untold stories of resistance from poor and working-class communities. At present, five corporations dominate the media landscape, including 90% of what we read, watch, listen to, and depend on for information about the world. Nowhere among the headlines do we hear the perspectives of working people and movements for social justice. Our mission is to break through the static, disinformation and fluff. Read other articles by BreakThrough News, or visit BreakThrough News's website.

 The Venezuelan People Stay With the Bolivarian Revolution

by Vijay Prashad

 July 31, 2024
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Photograph Source: Wilfredor – CC0

On July 28, the 70th birthday of Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), Nicolás Maduro Moros won the Venezuelan presidential election, the fifth since the Bolivarian Constitution was ratified in 1999. In January 2025, Maduro will start his third six-year term as president. He took over the reins of the Bolivarian Revolution after the death of Chávez from pelvic cancer in 2013. Since the death of Chávez, Maduro has faced several challenges: to build his own legitimacy as president in the place of a charismatic man who came to define the Bolivarian Revolution; to tackle the collapse of oil prices in mid-2014, which negatively impacted Venezuela’s state revenues (over 90 percent of which was from oil exports); and to manage a response to the unilateral, illegal sanctions deepened on Venezuela by the United States as oil prices declined. These negative factors weighed heavily on the Maduro government, which has now been in office for a decade after being re-elected through the ballot box in 2018 and now in 2024.

From Maduro’s first election victory in 2013, the increasingly far-right opposition began to reject the electoral process and complain about irregularities in the system. Interviews I have held over the past decade with conservative politicians have made it clear that they recognize both the ideological grip of Chavismo over the working class of Venezuela and the organizational power not only of Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela but of the networks of Chavismo that run from the communes (1.4 million strong) to youth organizations. About half of Venezuela’s voting population is reliably wedded to the Bolivarian project, and no other political project in Venezuela has the kind of election machine built by the forces of the Bolivarian revolution. That makes winning an election for the anti-Chávez forces impossible. To that end, their only path is to malign Maduro’s government as corrupt and to complain that the elections are not fair. After Maduro’s victory—by a margin of 51.2 percent to 44.2 percent—this is precisely what the far-right opposition has been trying to do, egged on by the United States and a network of far-right and pro-U.S. governments in South America.

Europe Needs Venezuelan Oil

The United States has been trying to find a solution to a problem of its own making. Having placed severe sanctions against both Iran and Russia, the United States now cannot easily find a source of energy for its European partners. Liquified natural gas from the United States is expensive and not sufficient. What the U.S. would like is to have a reliable source of oil that is easy to process and in sufficient quantities. Venezuelan oil fits the requirements, but given the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, this oil cannot be found in the European market. The United States has created a trap from which it finds few solutions.

In June 2022, the U.S. government allowed Eni SpA (Italy) and Repsol SA (Spain) to transport Venezuelan oil to the European market to compensate for the loss of Russian oil deliveries. This allowance revealed Washington’s shift in strategy regarding Venezuela. No longer was it going to be possible to suffocate Venezuela by preventing exports of oil, since this oil was needed as a result of U.S. sanctions on Russia. Since June 2022, the United States has been trying to calibrate its need for this oil, its antipathy to the Bolivarian Revolution, and its relations with the far-right opposition in Venezuela.

The U.S. and the Venezuelan Far-Right

The emergence of Chavismo—the politics of mass action to build socialism in Venezuela—transformed the political scenario in the country. The old parties of the right (Acción Democrática and COPEI) collapsed after 40 years of alternating power. In the 2000 and 2006 elections, the opposition to Chávez was provided not by the right, but by dissenting center-left forces (La Causa R and Un Nuevo Tiempo). The Old Right faced a challenge from the New Right, which was decidedly pro-capitalist, anti-Chavista, and pro-U.S.; this group formed a political platform called La Salida or The Exit, which referred to their desired exit from the Bolivarian Revolution. The key figures here were Leopoldo López, Antonio Ledezma, and María Corina Machado, who led violent protests against the government in 2014 (López was arrested for incitement to violence and now lives in Spain; a U.S. government official in 2009 said he is “often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry”). Ledezma moved to Spain in 2017 and was—with Corina Machado—a signatory of the far-rightMadrid Charter, an anti-communist manifesto organized by the Spanish far-right party, Vox. Corina Machado’s political project is underpinned by the proposal to privatize Venezuela’s oil company.

Since the death of Chávez, Venezuela’s right wing has struggled with the absence of a unified program and with a mess of egotistical leaders. It fell to the United States to try and shape the opposition into a political project. The most comical attempt was the elevation in January 2019 of an obscure politician named Juan Guaidó to be the president. That maneuver failed and in December 2022, the far-right opposition removed Guaidó as its leader. The removal of Guaidó allowed for direct negotiations between the Venezuelan government and the far-right opposition, which had since 2019 hoped for U.S. military intervention to secure them in power in Caracas.

The U.S. pressured the increasingly intransigent far-right to hold talks with the Venezuelan government in order to allow the U.S. to reduce sanctions and let Venezuelan oil go into European markets. This pressure resulted in the Barbados Agreement of October 2023, in which the two sides agreed to a fair election in 2024 as the basis for the slow withdrawal of the sanctions. The elections of July 28 are the outcome of the Barbados process. Even though María Corina Machado was barred from running, she effectively ran against Maduro through her proxy candidate Edmundo González and lost in a hard-fought election.

Twenty-three minutes after the polls closed, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris—and now a presidential candidate in the November elections in the United States—put out a tweet conceding that the far-right had lost. It was an early sign that the United States—despite making noises about election fraud—wanted to move past their allies in the far-right, find a way to normalize relations with the Venezuelan government and allow the oil to flow to Europe. This tendency of the U.S. government has frustrated the far-right, which turned to other far-right forces across Latin America for support, and which knows that its remaining political argument is about election fraud. If the U.S. government wants to get Venezuelan oil to Europe it will need to abandon the far-right and accommodate the Maduro government. Meanwhile, the far-right has taken to the streets through armed gangs who want to repeat the guarimba (barricade) disruptions of 2017.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August 2022).

Venezuelans Re-elect Maduro

by Roger D. Harris / July 29th, 2024

July 29, 2024, Caracas, Venezuela.  Shortly before midnight, the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Elvis Amoroso, announced the re-election of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. Like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, the US-backed and funded opposition cried fraud.

Maduro won with 51.2% of the vote. His nearest rival, the US-backed candidate Edmundo Gonzalez trailed by 7%.

While the US corporate press refers to the “opposition” as if it were a unified bloc, eight other names appeared on the ballot. Unlike the US, where most of the electorate is polarized around two major parties, the fractious opposition in Venezuela is split into many mutually hostile camps whose dislike of the ruling Socialist Party is matched by their loathing for each other. And this is despite millions of US tax-payer dollars used to try to unify a cabal that would carry Washington’s water.

Sore losers

In the quarter century since Hugo Chavez initiated the Bolivarian Revolution when he was elected president in 1998, the Chavistas have won all but two of some thirty national elections. The opposition celebrated when they won a national referendum and the 2015 National Assembly contest. But every other time, they lost to the coalition led by the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela).

All of these contests employed the same electoral system of multiple public audits, transparent counting, and an electronic vote backed with paper ballots. The system is incontrovertibly fraud-proof with over half of the ballot stations audited for verification of the electronic and paper results.  Former US President Jimmy Carter, whose electoral monitoring organization observed over ninety elections,  declared Venezuela’s system the best in the world.

Beyond the accusations, concrete proof of fraud had not been forthcoming in the past even though the data was publicly available.

July 28, 2024 Election

I was one of 910 internationals representing over one hundred countries invited to Venezuela to accompany this election. On July 28  I visited polling stations in the state of Miranda.

I observed long but orderly lines of people going to the polls. At each one of the individual mesas (rooms at a polling station), representatives of political parties sat to monitor the process. I spoke to representatives of Maduro’s Socialist Party (PSUV) as well as other parties. All expressed confidence in the fraud-proof nature of their electoral system. In fact, they are very proud of their system regardless of political affiliation.

According to news reports, there were cyberattacks on the electoral system. At some polling stations, far-right opposition elements reportedly attacked electoral workers in attempts to disrupt the process.

By my experience and observation,  the polls can best be described as festive. Seeing our international invitee credentials, which we wore on lanyards around our necks, we were universally greeted with shouts of bienvenido (welcome), V-signs, and applause. These were clearly a people with great civic pride.

This reception was the same in “popular” Chavista neighborhoods as well as wealthier ones. Some hoped for “change” and others for continuing the Bolivarian Revolution. But all freely and enthusiastically participated in the electoral process.

The accusations of fraud were not reflected by the actions of the people on the ground as evidenced by their participation and enthusiasm.

Days before the election

July 25, the last day of official campaigning, was marked by the final political rallies. The far-right drew an estimated 100,000. I attended the Maduro rally of some one million. As far as I could see, people had jammed the main boulevards of Caracas. Clearly the Chavistas have a vast and dedicated base.

And they are wildly supportive of their current president Nicolas Maduro, who is seen as carrying on the legacy of the deceased founder of the Bolivarian project, Hugo Chavez, whose birthday is the same as this election day.

But it goes deeper than that. As the slogan yo soy Chavez (I am Chavez) indicates, the base sees the Bolivarian project not simply as one of their political leadership but more so as a collective endeavor.

The real electoral interference

Far greater than any accusation of fraud manufactured by the opposition is the much more significant interference in the electoral process by Washington.

The vote for continuing the Bolivarian Revolution represents a mandate for national sovereignty. Venezuelans went to the polls knowing that a vote for the incumbent means no relief from US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called “sanctions” have been part of Washington’s regime-change campaign explicitly designed to asphyxiate the Venezuelan economy and turn the people against their government.

President Maduro says, “We are not anyone’s colony” and the majority of Venezuelans evidently agree.

Roger D. Harris is with the US Peace Council and the 39-year-old human rights organization Task Force on the Americas. Read other articles by Roger.

Trudeau’s Failure in Venezuela

by Yves Engler / July 29th, 2024

Yesterday Venezuelans voted for Nicolás Maduro to continue as president. The election highlights one of Justin Trudeau’s most embarrassing foreign policy failures and a lesson on media and government propaganda.

According to Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, Maduro received 51% of the vote. His main challenger, Edmundo Gonzalez, garnered 44% while 59% of eligible voters cast ballots.

Without presenting any evidence, the opposition cried foul. But they’ve done so after basically every election loss over the past 20 years (though not their wins).

The vote is the first presidential poll since a brazen Canadian-backed campaign to oust Maduro. In a bid to elicit “regime change,” Ottawa worked to isolate Caracas, imposed illegal sanctions, took the Maduro government to the International Criminal Court, financed an often-unsavoury opposition and decided that a marginal right-wing opposition politician was the country’s legitimate president.

On January 23, 2019, Juan Guaidó declared himself president of Venezuela in a Caracas park. The same day then foreign minister Chrystia Freeland formally recognized the little-known opposition politician. In subsequent days Canadian diplomats boasted to reporters that they played an important role in uniting large swaths of the Venezuelan opposition behind the plan to ratchet up tensions by proclaiming the new head of the opposition-dominated National Assembly president. They also told the Globe and Mail and Associated Press that Canada played an important role in building international diplomatic support for claiming the relatively marginal politician was president.

Amidst the exuberance the Liberals quickly organized a meeting of the Lima Group of states opposed to the Venezuelan government. At the February 4, 2019, meeting in Ottawa Trudeau declared, “the international community must immediately unite behind the interim president.” The post Lima Group “Ottawa Declaration” called on Venezuela’s armed forces “to demonstrate their loyalty to the interim president” by removing the elected president.

(Despite the opposition boycotting the May 2018 poll, Maduro received a higher proportion of the overall vote than leaders in the US, Canada and elsewhere. For instance, in 2019, Trudeau’s Liberals received 33% of the vote with 66% of eligible voters casting their ballots, which amounted to 22% of the adult population. Maduro received 67% of votes cast with 41% of eligible voters participating, which equaled 27% of the population.)

About a year before the poll Canada founded the anti-Maduro Lima Group coalition with Peru. A year later Canada and five like-minded South American nations asked the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor — the first time a member state was brought before the ICC by other members — to investigate the Maduro government. During this period Ottawa also severed diplomatic relations with Caracas and imposed four rounds of sanctions on Venezuelan officials. While ostensibly targeted at individuals, Canadian sanctions deterred companies from doing business in Venezuela. They also helped legitimate more devastating US actions. A recent front page Washington Post article detailed the impact of US sanctions played in Venezuela’s economic collapse.

Trudeau and Freeland were at the forefront of the anti-Maduro campaign. In the weeks after Guaidó declared himself president, Canada’s prime minister called the leaders of France, Spain, Paraguay, Ireland, Italy and others to convince them to join Canada’s campaign against the Venezuelan government. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Ottawa in April 2019 Canada’s post meeting release noted, “during the visit, Prime Minister Abe announced Japan’s endorsement of the Ottawa Declaration on Venezuela.”

At the end of that month Guaidó, opposition politician Leopoldo Lopez and others sought to stoke a military uprising in Caracas. Hours into the early morning effort Freeland tweeted, “watching events today in Venezuela very closely. The safety and security of Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López must be guaranteed. Venezuelans who peacefully support Interim President Guaidó must do so without fear of intimidation or violence.” She followed that up with a statement to the press noting, “Venezuelans are in the streets today demonstrating their desire for a return to democracy” and a video calling on Venezuelans to rise up. She later promoted a Lima Group statement labeling the attempted putsch an effort “to restore democracy” and demanded the military “cease being instruments of the illegitimate regime for the oppression of the Venezuelan people.”

While this failed insurrection marked the end of any realistic chance Guaidó had at becoming president, Trudeau openly supported him for months longer. In January 2020 Guaidó was fêted in Ottawa, meeting the PM, international development minister and foreign minister. A picture of Trudeau and Guaidó taking a selfie together was released by the Prime Minister’s Office and Trudeau declared, “I commend Interim President Guaidó for the courage and leadership he has shown in his efforts to return democracy to Venezuela, and I offer Canada’s continued support.”

Since then Guaidó has moved to the US and the Lima group has become dormant. But the Trudeau government hasn’t formally reversed its position or restarted diplomatic relations or withdrawn sanctions.

On the third anniversary of Guaidó’s presidential self-declaration an open letter was released demanding Trudeau stop recognizing Guaidó, end sanctions and reset relations with Venezuela. It was signed by 2 MPs, 4 former MPs and 50 prominent individuals. The government should heed its call.

Very little to none of the above important context will appear in the mainstream media over what looks to be yet another ongoing US-led attempt to destabilize the Venezuelan government.

The bottom line? Neither the Canadian government nor media should be considered arbiters of truth regarding events in Venezuela. They have repeatedly proven themselves self-interested liars and agents of US hegemony.

Yves Engler is the author of 12 books. His latest book is Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People's History of the Canadian Military . Read other articles by Yves.

 

China Announces Palestinian Unity Pact: How Netanyahu’s Policies Fostered Hamas-Fatah Collaboration

by J.D. Hester Posted onJuly 29, 2024

It is clear that while the United States continues to support disastrous wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the global community will not trust the United States as a legitimate partner for peace. Meanwhile, China has, in recent years, postured itself as a unifying force for peace in the world. Whether or not you believe that China is sincere in its supposed desire for world peace, it has achieved some success. Most recently, China successfully helped facilitate a deal between Hamas and Fatah, the two leading political forces in Palestine, to create a unity government in post-war Palestine. Through peace agreements such as the Saudi-Iran deal, China has created real pathways towards peace in the Middle East. Additionally, China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukrainian Crisis has been cited by Russia as a viable peace agreement which could end Europe’s latest war. Chinese diplomats also met with Ukrainian diplomats in an attempt to bring both sides of the war to the bargaining table. After a day of “very deep and concentrated” conversation, Ukraine stated that it is open to peace talks on the condition that Russia “acts in good faith”.

While China’s latest deal between the two major political parties in Palestine is historic, it should come as no surprise to anyone that China would be successful in its efforts to broker a deal. Judging by the fact that Hamas and Fatah fought a civil war, it is clear that the secular moderates of Fatah and the radical Islamists of Hamas clearly have different views for how Gaza should be run. Nevertheless, both sides have a clear and common enemy in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel even if President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah blames Hamas for the current stage of the conflict in Gaza and disagrees with Hamas’s vicious October 7th terror attacks.

Clearly, Fatah’s new alliance with Hamas is a purely pragmatic attempt at forming a united government to rebuild post-war Gaza and not an endorsement of Islamic terrorism. Nevertheless, warmongers like Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Israel Katz, have stated on X that “…Mahmoud Abbas embraces the murderers and rapists of Hamas, revealing his true face.” Katz further stated that “…[the unity government] won’t happen because Hamas’s rule will be crushed…” even though multiple mainstream news organizations including CNN have reported that Israel has “no viable plan for how to end the war or what comes next”. Even top spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Adm. Daniel Hagari, does not seem to think the war is winnable calling Hamas “an idea”.

The only way to defeat ideas is to present alternatives. Unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu has only helped add fuel to the fire of the “idea” of Hamas throughout his political career. In an attempt to prevent Mahmoud Abbas or any other Palestinian figure from establishing an internationally recognized Palestinian state, Netanyahu encouraged Egypt and Qatar to allow Hamas to receive funding from abroad. Netanyahu willingly allowed a terrorist organization to grow in strength to oppose secular moderates in Gaza, and did not take the empowered terror group’s threats seriously even though he had intelligence of their plans a year in advance. He then launched an indiscriminate bombing campaign and invasion which killed thousands of civilians and made the terrorists even more popular. With this in mind, is it any surprise that Fatah and Hamas are tired of being used as tools against each other?

Ultimately, Netanyahu’s Israel has learned from the mistakes of Apartheid South Africa. They have learned that it is much easier to justify war crimes against civilians when the enemies are terrorists. It is much harder to carry out a genocide while maintaining the support of foreign powers if the enemies are secular democrats wishing for peace and equality (like Fatah or the African National Congress).

Hamas and Fatah may hate each other, but both groups hate Israel more and realize that a divided government in a post-war Gaza will only play into the hand of Israel.

J.D. Hester is an American writer born and raised in Arizona. He has previously written for antiwar.com. You can send him an email at josephdhester@gmail.com.

 

Osama Bin Laden’s Enduring Triumph

by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt Posted onJuly 30, 2024

Here’s a strange thing to even begin to grasp. In all these years, at least in Washington, the heartland of American power, it hasn’t been understood, not even faintly. In — yes! — all these years, including significant parts of the last century and this one, this country has continually poured ever more money into its military budget. The numbers have become utterly staggering as that yearly budget heads for a cool trillion dollars.

And yet, in those same years, the United States, which now spends more on its military than the next nine (or is it 10?) countries combined, hasn’t been able to win a single war that mattered. In the last century, it essentially tied (if you can even use such a word in relation to a hell on earth) in the Korean War and distinctly lost in Vietnam. In this century, as part of its never-ending Global War on Terror, it spent 20 (yes, 20!) years losing its war in Afghanistan and functionally did the same thing in Iraq. Nor, as TomDispatch regular Nick Turse has reported brilliantly in these years, has it had real success in the rest of the Middle East or Africa, where, he’s estimated, since that war on terror began, deaths from terrorism have increased by more than 50,000% and terror attacks by more than 75,000%.

Given such a record of “success,” if it were any other government program, there would be severe cutbacks and major criticism (especially in an election year), but when it comes to the U.S. military, not a chance, not for a moment. And worse yet, as Turse points out today, even though the Global War on Terror has finally more or less ground to a halt, if not an end, almost 23 years after it was launched, the casualties from it continue to mount in a distinctly — yes! — suicidal fashion. What a horror… but let him explain as vividly as he always does. ~ Tom Engelhardt

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Osama Bin Laden’s Enduring Triumph

by Nick Turse

At the end of the last century, hoping to drive the United States from Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sought to draw in the American military. He reportedly wanted to “bring the Americans into a fight on Muslim soil,” provoking savage asymmetric conflicts that would send home a stream of “wooden boxes and coffins” and weaken American resolve. “This is when you will leave,” he predicted.

After the 9/11 attacks, Washington took the bait, launching interventions across the Greater Middle East and Africa. What followed was a slew of sputtering counterterrorism failures and stalemates in places ranging from Niger and Burkina Faso to Somalia and Yemen, a dismal loss, after 20 years, in Afghanistan, and a costly fiasco in Iraq. And just as bin Laden predicted, those conflicts led to discontent in the United States. Americans finally turned against the war in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting there, while it took only a little more than a year for the public to conclude that the Iraq war wasn’t worth the cost. Still, those conflicts dragged on. To date, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other militant groups.

As lethal as those Islamist fighters have been, however, another “enemy” has proven far more deadly for American forces: themselves. A recent Pentagon study found suicide to be the leading cause of death among active-duty U.S. Army personnel. Out of 2,530 soldiers who died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, 35% — 883 troops — took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.

Those military findings bolster other recent investigations. The journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego found, for example, that young men in the military are more likely to take their own lives than their civilian peers. The suicide rate for American soldiers has, in fact, risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago.

Last year, the medical journal JAMA Neurology reported that the suicide rate among U.S. veterans was 31.7 per 100,000 — 57% greater than that of non-veterans. And that followed a 2021 study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project which found that, compared to those who died in combat, at least four times as many active-duty military personnel and post-9/11 war veterans — an estimated 30,177 of them — had killed themselves.

“High suicide rates mark the failure of the U.S. government and U.S. society to manage the mental health costs of our current conflicts,” wrote Thomas Howard Suitt, author of the Costs of War report. “The U.S. government’s inability to address the suicide crisis is a significant cost of the U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the result is a mental health crisis among our veterans and service members with significant long-term consequences.”

Military Shocked (Shocked!) by a Rise in Suicides

In June, a New York Times front-page investigation found that at least a dozen Navy SEALs had died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while on active duty or shortly after leaving military service. Thanks to an effort by the families of those deceased special operators, eight of their brains were delivered to a specialized Defense Department brain trauma laboratory in Maryland. Researchers there discovered blast damage in every one of them — a particular pattern only seen in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves like SEALs endure from weapons fired in years of training and war-zone deployments as well as explosions encountered in combat.

The Navy claimed that it hadn’t been informed of the lab’s findings until the Times contacted them. A Navy officer with ties to SEAL leadership expressed shock to reporter Dave Philipps. “That’s the problem,” said that anonymous officer. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”

None of it should, however, have been surprising.

After all, while writing for the Times in 2020, I revealed the existence of an unpublished internal study, commissioned by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), on the suicides of Special Operations forces (SOF). Conducted by the American Association of Suicidology, one of the nation’s oldest suicide-prevention organizations, and completed sometime after January 2017, the undated 46-page report put together the findings of 29 “psychological autopsies,” including detailed interviews with 81 next-of-kin and close friends of commandos who had killed themselves between 2012 and 2015.

That study told the military to better track and monitor data on the suicides of its elite troops. “Further research and an improved data surveillance system are needed in order to better understand the risk and protective factors for suicide among SOF members. Further research and a comprehensive data system is needed to monitor the demographics and characteristics of SOF members who die by suicide,” the researchers advised. “Additionally, the data emerging from this study has highlighted the need for research to better understand the factors associated with SOF suicides.”

Quite obviously, it never happened.

The brain trauma suffered by SEALs and the suicides that followed should not have been a shock. A 2022 study in Military Medicine found Special Operations forces were at increased risk for traumatic brain injury (TBI), when compared with conventional troops. The 2023 JAMA Neurology study similarly found that veterans with TBI had suicide rates 56% higher than veterans without it and three times higher than the U.S. adult population. And a Harvard study, funded by SOCOM and published in April, discovered an association between blast exposure and compromised brain function in active-duty commandos. The greater the exposure, the researchers found, the more health problems were reported.

Studies on the Shelf

Over the last two decades, the Defense Department has, in fact, spent millions of dollars on suicide prevention research. According to the recent Pentagon study of soldiers’ deaths at their own hands, the “Army implements various initiatives that evaluate, identify, and track high-risk individuals for suicidal behavior and other adverse outcomes.” Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.

While the Navy, for example, officially mandated that a suicide hotline for veterans must be accessible from the homepage of every Navy website, an internal audit found that most of the pages reviewed were not in compliance. In fact, according to a 2022 investigation by The Intercept, the audit showed that 62% of the 58 Navy homepages did not comply with that service’s regulations for how to display the link to the Veterans Crisis Line.

The New York Times recently investigated the death of Army Specialist Austin Valley and discovered gross suicide prevention deficiencies. Having just arrived at an Army base in Poland from Fort Riley, Kansas, Valley texted his parents, “Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault,” before taking his own life. The Times found that “mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.” There are, for example, only about 20 mental-health counselors available to care for the more than 12,000 soldiers at Fort Riley, according to the Times. As a result, soldiers like Valley can wait weeks or even months for care.

The Army claims it’s working to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health support, but the Times found that “unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols.” This is a long-running issue in the military. The study of Special Operations suicides that I revealed in the Times found that suicide prevention training was seen as a “check in the box.” Special operators believed their careers would be negatively impacted if they sought treatment.

Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Memphis, told to the Times that the Pentagon report echoed many other analyses produced since 2008. “My expectation,” he concluded, “is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented.”

Bin Laden’s Triumph

On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALs attacked a residential compound in Pakistan and gunned down Osama bin Laden. “For us to be able to definitively say, ‘We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who had been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of,” President Barack Obama commented afterward. In reality, the deaths “here in the United States” have never ended. And the war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001 — a global conflict that still grinds on today — ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.

The suicides of U.S. military personnel have been blamed on a panoply of reasons, including military culture, ready access to firearms, high exposure to trauma, excessive stress, the rise of improvised explosive devices, repeated head trauma, an increase in traumatic brain injuries, the Global War on Terror’s protracted length, and even the American public’s disinterest in their country’s post-9/11 wars.

During 20-plus years of armed interventions by the country that still prides itself on being the Earth’s sole superpower, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the peoples of those countries have suffered the most, U.S. troops have also been caught in that maelstrom of America’s making.

Bin Laden’s dream of luring American troops into a meat-grinder war on “Muslim soil” never quite came to pass. Compared to previous conflicts like the Second World War, Korean, and Vietnam wars, U.S. battlefield casualties in the Greater Middle East and Africa have been relatively modest. But bin Laden’s prediction of “wooden boxes and coffins” filled with the “bodies of American troops” nonetheless came true in its own fashion.

“This Department’s most precious resource is our people. Therefore, we must spare no effort in working to eliminate suicide within our ranks,” wrote Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a public memo released last year. “One loss to suicide is too many.” But as with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short. And like the losses, stalemates, and fiascos of that grim war on terror, the fallout has been more suffering and death. Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues. The unanticipated toll of suicides by troops and veterans — four times the number of war-on-terror battlefield deaths — has become another Pentagon failure and bin Laden’s enduring triumph.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse