Forgotten February (A brief peek at America's unrestrained brutality) (Mickey Z.)

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

Feb. 5, 2007 -- Just in case anyone needs reminding that "USA" has always stood for "United States of Aggression," here are a forgotten few from February's Files:

February 1898

In 1897, Teddy Roosevelt stated bluntly, "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." His wait lasted less than a year.
Feb. 15, 1898, was a muggy Tuesday night in Havana Harbor. Some 350 crew and officers settled in on board the Maine. "At 9:40 p.m., the ship's forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water," writes author Tom Miller. "Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption -- this one deafening and massive -- splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn't battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air."

The Maine was in Havana Harbor in 1898 on a purportedly friendly mission. "At a certain point in that spring, (President) McKinley and the business community began to see that their object, to get Spain out of Cuba, could not be accomplished without war," writes Howard Zinn, "and that their accompanying object, the securing of American military and economic influence in Cuba, could not be left to the Cuban rebels, but could be ensured only by U.S. intervention."

American newspapers, especially those run by Hearst (New York Journal) and Pulitzer (New York World), jumped on the Maine explosion as the ideal justification to drum up public support for a war of imperialism. "Tabloid headlines depicting Spanish atrocities against Cubans became commonplace, and the influential papers of both men were outdoing each other in the sensationalized screaming for war," says historian Kenneth C. Davis. When Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to supply pictures, he reported that he could not find a war. "You furnish the pictures," Hearst famously replied, "and I'll furnish the war."

(In 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted an investigation of the Maine disaster. Rickover and his team of experts concluded that the explosion was probably caused by "spontaneous combustion inside the ship's coal bins," a problem common to ships of that era.)

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