June 30, 2006
Democrats Need to Stop Whining About Vote Theft and Start Winning
Okay, I'm just going to say it.
I'm sick of hearing from liberals and leftists that the game is up, that the election system is finished, because Republicans are just stealing elections now.
If there was ever a self-defeating argument this one is it.
I have no doubt that the Republicans have been carefully studying the nation's archaic, decentralized voting process, and have figured out ways to game the system. I have no doubt that by a combination of conspiracy to violate voters' rights, by corrupt practices at the county level, and by political collusion on the part of the Supreme Court conservative majority, they stole the Florida election in 2000, and with it, the presidency. While there is clear evidence that they attempted the same thing in 2004, I'm not as certain that they succeeded there at least on the post-vote counting side, though they clearly discouraged and illegally turned away more than enough voters to clinch a win in that state.
That said, elections in the U.S. are being stolen not because of Republican actions, but because of Democratic inaction, stupidity, laziness and other failures.
Elections are being stolen in the U.S. because of the rank inattention of the mass of American voters, who have become either non-participants, or mere passive participants in what should be the fulcrum of democracy.
In the 2004 election, I went around to voting precincts in my home community, and found that there were sometimes no Democrats even present when it was time to do the counting. That is an open invitation to vote fraud and theft. It's a scandal that is the result of a Democratic Party leadership having become so divorced from its base that no one feels obliged to volunteer to be a registered poll official. I’m sure that this situation has been replicated all across the country.
Worse yet, the massive voter intimidation and suppression campaigns that Republicans have mounted, not just in Florida in 2000 and 2004, or in Ohio in 2004, but all over the country, and which they will surely mount again this November, are only possible because there is no countervailing effort by Democrats to fight against those corrupt practices.
Where is the army of Democrats that should be dogging Republicans as they go about their house-to-house dirty work? Where are the counter-informational mailings to vulnerable groups—black servicemen and women whom Greg Palast (in his new book Armed Madhouse has shown were sent bogus mailings by Republican operatives who knew they had been shipped overseas, so that they could bring back the returned envelopes and cynically show them to election officials and claim, illegally, that those people were not actually in residence and should be stricken from the rolls?
Where are the Democrats to stand at polling stations and defend voters from aggressive Republican efforts to challenge their right to vote?
Where are Democrats armed with coats, umbrellas and hot meals to keep voters in lines (or to assign numbers and set up van transportation as needed, so people could leave and return to vote) when craven Republican bureaucrats vilely limit the number of voting machines in low-income and minority districts, forcing people to wait for hours to cast their votes?
Around the world, people struggling against authoritarian regimes vastly more corrupt and brutal than our own, with electoral systems far more corrupted, have endured threats, guns, violence, and worse in order to vote. They have demonstrated when elections have been stolen, blockading city centers until they have won.
And what do we Americans do here, when faced with the antics of the Republican vote thieves? The prime victim of those abuses, the Democratic Party, rolls over, with its leadership largely denying that it happens. Worse yet, all too many of us, the citizens, just whine that we've been robbed, and then write off the process as hopelessly corrupt.
This is the major scandal.
If the voters of this nation care enough about our damaged democracy to demand honest elections, we will get honest elections. If we just cave in and say the system is corrupt and the outcome is predetermined because of vote theft, then it will be predetermined.
This fall, Democrats need to do much more than just register voters and get them to the polls. They need an all-out campaign to combat what we know will be aggressive Republican voter suppression efforts. They need to have people massed at every voting precinct when counting time comes, so that local officials will be afraid to steal the votes. They need to have volunteers in official capacity as observers at every polling station through the day and until the votes are tallied and delivered. Democrats also need to give voters a reason for voting, which means offering more than "wedge" issues. They need to take stands like a commitment to ending the Iraq War, to cutting the bloated defense budget, and to impeaching the president—so that instead of less than half of registered Democrats coming out to vote, all Democrats will show up to vote.
America's voting system is a disgrace and a national embarrassment. But American citizens themselves are equally disgraceful in allowing this outrage to continue.
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June 28, 2006
Congress is Derelict and Needs to be Replaced by People Who Take Their Oath of Office Seriously
"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
-- Mark Twain
Over the course of the past year, it has been discovered that President Bush, during his five years in office, has cancelled all or part of 750 laws of Congress, quietly and with the stroke of a pen. These so-called "signing statements" have been used to invalidate laws passed by Congress to do everything from require government reporting on the uses of the PATRIOT Act's invasive provisions to banning torture and establishing a special investigator for corruption in Iraq.
The Senate Judiciary Committee headed by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) is finally holding hearings into this issue, but don't expect much from a that can't even get worked up over the White House's insulting refusal to send over key people to testify.
Meanwhile, Tony Snow, the president’s smarmy flak, says all those "signing statements" are simply a way for Bush to "express reservations about the constitutionality" of those laws.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), one of the president's yes-men in Congress, says, "The president is entitled to express his opinion. It's the courts that determine what the law is. I don't know why the issue of presidents issuing signing statements is controversial at all."
Well John, here’s the reason: The Constitution.
Remember that hoary document? It's the one you and the rest of your mealy-mouthed, high-living, coiffed and chauffeured colleagues in Congress swore to uphold when you took office and started collecting your salaries as representatives of the People.
Let's take a look at that yellowed parchment.
Regarding the powers of the president, Article II says:
The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
It goes on to define that power, saying:
The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.
The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.
Notice, Tony and John, that there is nothing in there about "signing statements" or about "expressing reservations" about laws passed by Congress. The president does, of course, have the right to "express" whatever he wants--that's guaranteed by the First Amendment, if it's still in force. But cancelling laws is not a matter of "expression," it's called "supression" or "repression."
Now let's look at what the Constitution says about Congress and its powers. In Article I it says:
All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
The key word there is "all," which kind of precludes the president form diddling around with a law afterwards with some "signing statement."
Article I makes its point clearer, adding that Congress has the power:
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.
That really doesn't leave a lot of room for presidential interpretation, does it?
So why do we care, John?
Okay, so suppose we then let this towering paragon of erudition and virtue go ahead and second-guess the Congress, and just ex out whatever laws or provisions of laws that he deems unwise.
Well, it won't stop there. Although the self-involved, self-aggrandizing members of Congress may only care about who's greasing their palms tomorrow, in a little more than two years, there's going to be another president and another Congress.
If this president is allowed to get away with undermining Congress' constitutional power in this egregious manner, the next president, whether it's Bill Frist, the Newt, Hillary Clinton or Al Gore, will take office with Bush's definition of presidential power as his or her starting point.
Is that what you guys want?
Why not just scrap the Constitution, then? Why waste all that valuable space in the National Archives exhibiting a document that has ceased to have any meaning?
For that matter, why are we bothering to elect you guys? You--and here I mean the Republicans and most of the Democrats in the House and Senate--are daily proving that you view your own jobs as essentially meaningless
If you can't see or admit how this president is undermining the whole concept of separation of powers, and establishing himself, and the presidency, as a dictatorship in all but name, if you won't stand up in defense of your own institution and the Constitution you were sworn to uphold, you should all be fired, and the Congress abolished as a massive waste of taxpayer money.
Fortunately, we have an alternative, which is also laid out in the Constitution. That is election and impeachment.
If you and your current colleagues won't call the president to account over these subversive "signing statements," we The People are going to have to oust a bunch of you this November. Then we'll have to hold the feet of those who are left to the fire, and demand impeachment hearings to declare this president a perpetrator of High Crimes against the Constitution.
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June 27, 2006
War is War, and Captured Soldiers are Captured Soldiers
I don't pretend to be an expert on the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I do know biased reporting when I see it, and the reporting here in the U.S. on that ongoing bloodletting in Palestine is certainly biased in the extreme.
Just look at the latest story, about the capture of an Israeli soldier. Palestinian fighters, allegedly linked to Hamas, in a daring raid, attacked a group of Israeli soldiers near the border of Gaza, killing two and capturing one.
This incident came after a period when the Israeli military has been shelling and rocketing Gaza, quite likely killing a whole family of beachgoers (though the Israeli military claims rather improbably that this was the result of a Hamas mine, not of a shell), and a number of other civilians.
Almost universally in the U.S. media, including on National Public Radio, the captured Israeli soldier is being referred to as a hostage and his capture is referred to as a "kidnapping."
Note that Israeli jails are brimming with captured Palestinian fighters, but this is not called kidnapping, nor are they called "hostages," though they often end up getting their freedom in in exchange for the return of captured Israeli soldiers who are referred to as "hostages," not prisoners.
Take this story in the June 27 issue the New York Times, which states:
"The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, ordered his security services on Monday to find a kidnapped Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip...
"...The groups holding him said that before any information would be disclosed, israel must release all Palestinian women in its jails and all Palestinian prisoners under the age of 18."
The same linguistic bias occurs with regularity in the coverage of the Iraq War and occupation, with resistance fighters in Iraq routinely referred to in the U.S. media as "terrorists." On the rare occasions when those "terrorists" have managed to capture a U.S. soldier, those incidents are referred to as "kidnappings," too.
Meanwhile, captured Iraqi fighters are often referred to as criminals when caught, not as prisoners of war.
It is no accident that this perversion of language is occurring. The Pentagon and the Israeli government both use this biased language in their briefings to reporters, and the U.S. media lap it up and recite it uncritically.
The problem with this is that the average American then has a warped perspective on two important conflicts that are profoundly affecting the political and economic situation here at home in the United States. These readers and viewers, by uncritically accepting the abased terminology that is presented to them, end up assuming that the U.S. and Israel are fighting crime and terror in Palestine and Iraq, when in fact both nations are fighting wars against people who, far from being criminals, are for the most part committed fighters who believe they are fighting in defense of their own nations. That is why they fight so hard and so courageously against such overwhelming odds.
How are Americans going to understand the depth and passion of the resistance to U.S. aggression in Iraq, if they are led by the media's misuse of language to believe that our troops are simply fighting bandits and criminals? How are we to understand the interminable horrors of the Israel/Palestine conflict if we are told that it is simply a battle between the good guys (the Israeli Defense Force), and the bad guys (a bunch of Palestinian hoodlums)?
The media should at least be forced to be even-handed. If Palestinians are "kidnapping" Israeli soldiers when they capture them, then the Israelis are "kidnapping" Palestinians when they do the same. Otherwise, let's concede that both are capturing their opponents and holding them prisoner.
And while we're at it, let's start calling Iraqi fighters what they are: resistance fighters, not terrorists.
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June 26, 2006
On the Road With Impeachment
Over this past week, I had a few experiences in the course of several book events for The Case for Impeachment which both illustrate the importance of this constitutionally important method of checking the actions of dangerous or criminal presidents, and the difficulty of doing so.
On Friday, I debated my Counterpunch editor, Jeff St. Clair, in a forum that was part of the International Socialist Organization conference at Columbia University in New York. Jeff crushed my argument in favor of impeachment at that forum with a brilliant monologue of one-liners that made John Stewart's "Daily Show" seem like a Dick Cavett re-run. Declaring that Bush had in five years managed to destroy the U.S. military, U.S. imperialist strategy, the U.S. economy, and any remaining credibility that the New York Times might have once had, he asked the assembled radicals in the audience to "just imagine what else he could accomplish in just two more years in office!"
Jeff, who said he had supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton (though for his war against the Iraqi people and other substantive reasons, not for adultery and lying about adultery), argued that impeachment was a bad idea because the Bush administration is doing such a good job of destroying the world's leading imperialist power.
Against such an onslaught, particularly one presented with such biting humor, I was hard-put to make the impeachment case--particularly because the self-styled radicals in the audience were for the most part predisposed to dismiss electoral politics as futile or, even worse, as a diversion designed to trick and placate the masses.
A part of me has to agree with Jeff's basic analysis, but then, I think it is also true that off-hand dismissal of electoral politics by the hard left also represents a kind of diversion and a convenient cop-out. After all, the left, for all its rejection of electoral politics, has accomplished essentially nothing when it comes to halting U.S. militarism and imperialism, or challenging the rapacious behavior of the domestic corporations that increasingly dictate U.S. domestic and foreign policy. It's easy to claim elections are a joke, and easy to organize marches down Broadway or demonstrations in D.C.'s Lafayette Square, but none of these actions have altered U.S. policy one bit.
It's also easy to dismiss the US Constitution as the literary product of landed gentry and nascent capitalists, but the reality is that that remarkable if flawed document has been the basis for laws barring race and sex discrimination, protecting free speech and assembly, and outlawing child labor. It also provides the basis for challenging a president bent on becoming a dictator.
But for the Constitution to work, it has to have the active and aggressive support of the people--its protections, as historian Howard Zinn has ably pointed out, are routinely violated in the absence of mass protest--and dissing the document is no way to build that kind of support.
I would argue that those on the left who reject electoral politics in this era are making a possibly fatal error. Jeff's mocking account of Bush presidency's incompetence was truly inspired, but I see this administration in a much more dangerous light than he does--or at least than he did in that debate. My experience living in the military-fascist Chinese state during the early 1990s, and my experience living in West Germany in the mid-`60s when memories of the rise of the Nazis were still fresh, convince me that the past five years in the U.S. have represented a concerted march towards fascist dictatorship--a march that calls for a broad, multi-fronted resistance, both electoral and extra-parliamentary.
Democrats in Congress--particularly the leadership of the Democratic Party which has been so complicit in many of the policies like the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and apparently even the NSA spying that are paving the way to a one-party state--are a weak straw on which to hang hopes for that resistance. That said, the Democratic Party does provide a vehicle for millions of people who value freedom and democracy but who aren't ready to fight back by taking to the streets or storming the citadels of power as my colleague Jeff proposes. For a variety of reasons, the US is not France, the Philippines or the Ukraine.
It is a historic mistake, I believe, for the left to walk away from that electoral process and from those millions of potential opponents of authoritarian rule.
I believe that a campaign for impeachment, which according to some polls a majority of Americans and nearly all Democrats support, is a way of both educating the public about the Republican-led, corporate-backed drive towards dictatorship and neo-fascist control and of consolidating and rallying progressive forces within the Democratic Party. The latter effort is crucial if the death grip of the Democratic Leadership Council of conservative Democrats is to be pried loose from the control levers of the party.
Saturday found me, together with my co-author Barbara Olshansky, at a church on the New Haven green, talking about impeachment to an audience organized by Squeaky Wheel Productions, a group that produces the syndicated radio program "Between the Lines."
This audience was composed almost totally of people who are committed to Democratic politics. The wild applause that ensued on several occasions when I endorsed their efforts to back insurgent Ned Lamont in his effort to deny the Democratic Party nomination in Connecticut to incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman made that clear. Lamont, by some accounts, now has the backing of as many as 40 percent of the state’s Democrats, to the point that Lieberman has already said he would run as an Independent if he should lose the primary this August. That said, it would be an astonishing victory for the left if the pro-war, pro-Patriot Act Lieberman were defeated by the voters of his own party--and such an event would send shivers down the cartilaginous spines of every pro-war, pro-Patriot Act Democratic member of Congress.
Of the two groups, I have to say I have much more respect for the efforts of the activists at the Squeaky Wheel gathering than those at the ISO. It's not that the ISO activists are not committed and hard working. Many of them are certainly investing much more of their lives into their political struggle than those in that church in New Haven. But I'm convinced that for all that, the Democratic Party activists have a much better chance of halting the country's slide into fascism than do the ISO radicals. There is certainly an important role to be played by those who organize in the street (a role that could become even more important if electoral efforts fail), but at this point, with no viable Third Party, and no significant opposition in Congress to the Bush power grab, those who mock electoral resistance should reconsider their stance. A third event showed me why the Right has been able to make the inroads it has since 9-11. I was signing books at a Barnes&Noble store in Willow Grove, a suburb north of Philadelphia, when an older man stormed up and, shaking his finger at me, yelled, "What about Iran! Do you want to just let them build a nuclear bomb and then blow it up here?" As heads turned all over the store, I told him that his argument was preposterous--that for Iran, or North Korea for that matter, to launch an atomic bomb at the U.S. would be to commit national suicide. Any country that did such a thing would be obliterated by a U.S. response, and countries don’t commit suicide
"What about the attack on the World Trade Center?" he countered angrily. "They committed suicide!"
"But those people, were not a country," I replied. "They were individuals acting on behalf of a little organization, not a country. And the organization was not committing suicide, either--just those men in the planes."
"That’s your problem," he shouted in triumph before storming out of the store. "You’re too rational!"
` Like Jeff St. Clair, he had me there.
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June 21, 2006
"Cut and Run": A Winning Slogan and Strategy...If the Democrats are Serious about Wanting to Win
The Democrats in Congress are having trouble coming up with a position on the War in Iraq because they are so afraid of Republican charges that they are the "cut and run" party.
It's a pathetic spectacle, and they should give it up. The way I see it "cut and run" is the slogan the Democrats should adopt as their own for the 2006 election year.
Democrats: the party of cut and run.
But I'm not talking about the war.
The "cut" should be for cutting the defense budget.
It makes no sense for the U.S. to be spending more money than the rest of the world combined on the military. All that taxpayer dough certainly doesn't do anything to combat terrorism. As the insurgents in Iraq are demonstrating daily, all that heavy equipment and those billion-dollar supersonic aircraft, and those guys bundled up like it's the North Pole running around with heavy artillery in their hands aren't doing much about catching guys armed with creaky AK-47s and home-made explosive devices. And they sure aren't catching Osama bin Laden.
Meanwhile, all that money is just providing excuses for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their gang of yes-men generals to get the country and its out-of-work young men and women into bloody, pointless messes like Iraq.
The answer is to take the toys away. Just think what could be done with the $250 billion a year that would be freed up instantly if the $500-billion military budget were cut in half! And it would be easy to do. Close all the bases that are just sitting around the U.S. to give members of Congress places to give 4th of July Day speeches, cancel spending on fancy new weapons programs to fight imaginary enemies, decommission half the soldiers, marines, sailors and pilots on the payroll—and of course bring the troops home from Iraq, not next year but now. (Surely a nation that was still spending half as much as the rest of the world combined wouldn't be at the mercy of anybody, though it might be a little harder to be an out-of-control imperialist bully.)
That gets us to the second part of the slogan: the “run” part.
And here's where the real fun starts.
For the last five years, we've had an administration that has proven it can't run anything. Look at the record: Bush has run the government into the ground, run the military into a ditch, run the nation's international reputation into the sewer, run our schools into crisis, run the budget off the rails, run away from his responsibility to protect the nation, and literally run away from taking the blame for any of his countless mistakes.
How inspiring it would be--and what a blessed relief--to have a party that was committed to actually "running" the government for a change.
With all the money saved by "cutting" the military budget back to a level appropriate for a nation that is not at war (and in case you haven’t heard, the U.S. is not at war even today, given that the so-called War on Terror is no war at all, the War in Afghanistan is a U.S. effort in which the U.S. is merely a participant there at the invitation of the Afghan government, and the troops currently in Iraq, who would be withdrawn in any case under this proposal, are merely guests of the Iraqi government, serving in a police function to help support the government, which according to the Bush administration, already has over 200,000 of its own troops--ten times the estimated number of rebels, terrorists and criminals opposing it), all things would be possible.
Democrats, with all that money saved from "cutting" the military budget, could actually "run" a government. They could provide funding for significantly smaller classroom sizes--the one reform that is guaranteed to improve the nation’s dismal education system. They could restore all the cuts in child welfare programs and rebuild the network of free-access community health clinics that years of Republican and Clintonian cuts have virtually eliminated. They could build a state-of-the-art flood control system to protect New Orleans, and a WPA-like program to help all New Orleans residents get back to their city. They could provide real assistance where it's needed in poor countries of the world that are suffering from lack of sanitation, clean water and basic health care.
If the Democrats came back into power and "cut" the massive tax giveaways of the Bush years out of the tax code, they could even do more. They could run the country back out of bankruptcy. They could provide real tax relief where it's needed: those working people who are barely getting by on $30-60,000 a year. They could make serious investments in public transportation to get the country out of polluting and oil-guzzling cars. They could fund research into non-polluting energy alternatives, and into developing a crash program to slow or prevent global warming.
The list is almost endless.
All the Democrats need to do is adopt a policy of cut and run, and take it to the people of the United States.
The first step would be for the American people--the ones who are fed up with the mendacity and rank incompetence of this administration and its backers in Congress--to get of their couches and to demand that the supposed opposition party stop diddling around with deadlines, and get serious about being in opposition.
My message for Democrats: Cut the crap. Run like you want to win. Cut the military. Run a real government.
Cut and Run.
It's a winning slogan.
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June 16t, 2006
2500 Wasted Lives, or "Just a Number"
The White House may think that 2500 is "just a number," but it does have terrible significance.
If 2500 American soldiers had died defending America from mortal danger, we might mourn the loss, but we would surely consider ourselves fortunate that the figure was so low. However, these 2500 men and women, most of them just entering adulthood, died not defending America, but in a war designed to bolster the political prospects and political power of the president.
That's a staggeringly high price to pay for what amounts to a campaign tactic.
American politics has always been dirty, but sending hundreds of thousands of mostly poor Americans off to war, getting 2500 of them killed and ten times that many grievously wounded, and maybe a hundred times that many mentally damaged, so that you can run for re-election as a "war president," and so that you can threaten your political critics with charges of "treason" and of being "soft on defense" or "soft on terror," is hitting a new low.
Sadly, this political tactic has been working, because most of what passes for an opposition party, particularly its leadership, has been so successfully intimidated that its representatives in Congress have barely dared to utter a peep of criticism.
Look at the two embarrassing "debates" this week over companion resolutions in House and Senate about supporting the war in Iraq. In the House, 42 gutless Democrats--roughly one in five--joined Republicans and voted 256-153 to "stay the course" in Iraq. In the Senate, a few days earlier, the vote was 93-6, meaning that nearly all Democrats joined in supporting the Republican motion.
That cowardly behavior by the Democrats in Congress is an insult to the 2500 young people who died thinking they were defending democracy. How can we call this country a democracy when the opposition party is so spineless and lacking in principle that even when it is clear beyond any question that the war was a criminal enterprise based upon lies and manipulation by the administration, its elected representatives cannot bring themselves to stand up and challenge it.
The blood of the next 2500 who die in this madness will be on the hands of those Democrats who voted for continued war.
This, by the way, is the same Democratic Party whose leaders are suggesting that if Democratic warhawk Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut senator and 2000 vice presidential candidate, is defeated in this August's Connecticut Democratic primary, he may end up getting the support of the national Democratic Party running as an independent candidate for re-election. Since the primary reason Lieberman is in danger of being ousted by an insurgent Democrat is Lieberman's unconscionable backing for Bush's Iraq War and for his so-called war on terror, a decision by party leaders to back him as an independent in the general election in November would be a direct repudiation of Connecticut Democrats' anti-war views.
This is clearly a party bent on self-destruction.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd conclude that people like House Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman Rep. Rahm Emanuel and Senate Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman Charles Schumer were Karl Rove plants in the party leadership, secretly working to destroy the party. I'm not a conspiracy theorist though. I think they are simply politicians without a scintilla of principle. They are also profoundly stupid and out of touch with the base of their own party.
The American people as a whole, and the vast majority of those who still call themselves Democrats, want two things: to have the War in Iraq ended, and to have President Bush removed from office as soon as possible.
A Democratic Party leadership that doesn't recognize this obvious reality--that has its representatives voting for smarmy resolutions calling for the U.S. to "stay the course" and that uses behind-the-scenes threats and arm-twisting to prevent its more progressive elected officials from calling for impeachment--is committing political suicide.
These cowards worry that if they vote against the war, they’ll be called "soft on terror." They worry that if they call for impeachment, they might stir up the passions of the Republican base. What they really seem to be afraid to do is to stir up the passions of their own Democratic base, which is what would happen if they'd start taking principled stands on issues of substance.
The Democratic insurgents in Connecticut (where I'm proud to say I grew up and where I got my start in journalism) have the answer: throw these cowards and weasels out!
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June 14, 2006
Unexpected Guest Drops in on Iraq's Prime Minister
I don't know which is more pathetic and embarrassing: the president's cowardly trip into the Green Zone in Baghdad, in which he didn't notify Iraq's prime minister of his "visit" until five minutes before the ostensible leader of Iraq was ushered in to meet the great Decider, or the fawning way the American media covered this farce.
The visit itself was hardly the bold stroke it was portrayed as. This was not a state visit by any standard. The president of the World's Last Remaining Superpower had to sneak into Iraq, not even notifying his own CIA of the trip for fear someone might tip off enemies in Iraq. When else has an American president visited another head of state without first notifying the head of state of his plans?
Apparently the White House is so worried about the reliability of the Iraqi government, from its chief of state on down, that it didn't dare to inform a single soul in that puppet regime in Baghdad of what was planned until it was a fait accompli. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had to be tricked into coming to the meeting with the president, presumably lest he alert the wrong people to Bush’s presence.
There was no state dinner, no 21-gun salute--well, I guess in a sense there were gun and bomb salutes going off all over Baghdad, some fired by the resistance, some fired by U.S. forces, and some fired by Iraqi puppet forces, all of which might in a sense be counted as "salutes to the president," but nobody was wearing color-guard uniforms for the occasion.
This was indeed a strange visit.
But the breathless coverage in the mainstream media has been as bizarre as the visit itself.
Apparently nobody in the corporate media has thought it strange and worth remarking on that the president had to sneak into Iraq in order to have a surprise meeting with the purported leader of the country.
In fact, if the president tried to sneak into any other country that had control over its own military, his plane would probably have been shot down as an intruder, or at least ordered to land at a designated airbase to be checked out. Not in Iraq, however, where the U.S. is the only country with planes in the air, and where decisions on who to shoot are made in Washington, not Baghdad.
What we really had here was a case of presidential grandstanding, akin to that famous posing on the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln. That first time, it was to declare that "major combat" was over in Iraq. This time it was to declare that the leader of the Iraqi insurgency had been terminated with extreme prejudice.
We saw how hollow was the president's first claim.
The hollowness of this latest claim was amply demonstrated by the furtive way that Bush had to sneak in and out of Iraq, where armed resistance to the U.S. occupation continues unabated, and the internal civil war grows apace.
Somehow the vaunted Fourth Estate missed that, from their comfy offices in the Green Zone and their stage sets in the network newsrooms in New York.
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June 11, 2006
Why Did They Kill Zarqawi Instead of Just Capture Him?
Nobody's going to morn the death of Al Zarqawi, me included, but there are some important questions about how and why he died that need asking.
From the available reports on the incident, it seems clear that the U.S. knew exactly where he was, and had plenty of troops surrounding the building before they called in an airstrike and dropped (depending on the story) one or two 500-1b. bombs directly on him.
It seems like they really wanted to kill him, not capture him. There is even a witness report that when they discovered he was not dead, his US captors beat him and made sure he died of his "wounds." Whether or not that report is correct, the bombing itself was certainly meant to kill him.
Now that's mighty curious when you think about it (which not many in the mainstream media are bothering to do).
Vengeance may be sweet, but when you have the chance to catch the leader of a gang and get the kind of information about his followers that you could never hope to get any other way, you're giving up an awful lot when you blow him up. If I were a GI, a Marine, or an Iraqi Shi'ia, I'd have been much happier if he were now a captive and experiencing the tender mercies of his interrogators. who might be learning where the others are who keep trying to blow me up with IEDs and suicide bombs.
I remember thinking, and writing, the same thing when the U.S., early in this occupation, had Saddam Hussein’s two sons trapped in a building and, instead of waiting them out and capturing them, with all the information they surely had about the whereabouts of the old man and of the organization of the Baathist resistance, the military blew up their house with rockets and bombs.
In Zarqawi's case, killing him with bombs meant, incidentally, the killing of an innocent little girl, aged 5-7 according to reports, and her mother and father. It could be that her parents were not so innocent (in which case c'est la non-vie), though we don't know that--they may have been pressured into letting him stay in their home--but the little girl who died to satisfy America’s bloodlust was an innocent.
Remember, this was done on orders of an administration that claims to believe every life is precious.
So let's get this straight: there was no justification for bombing that house. The U.S. military had Zarqawi in a perfect trap. He was surrounded. There was nowhere to run. There was a predator drone monitoring the site from above in case he tried to slip away.
So why did they kill him?
My guess is that it's the same reason they killed Saddam's two sons: The U.S. is not particularly anxious to have these guys talking about what they know about the U.S. in Iraq.
In the Saddam boys' case, they might have told tales of U.S. assistance to their father. At a minimum, they might have made it clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and at the point they were caught, the administration was still funding a desperate search to find anything (there is even talk that they may have been considering hiding something so they could find it).
In Zarqawi's case, there is speculation that he was something of an American creation. Certainly the U.S. left him alone before the war and during the war's early stages, when he and his gang or terrorist thugs were operating out of northern Iraq under the protection of the U.S. no-fly zone.
At the least, we can say that the Pentagon and the administration (because the decision about how to handle Zarqawi was surely made at the very top by The Decider and his advisers) made a stupid decision in killing him, rather than capturing him. If we think more suspiciously, there may have been method to the administration’s madness.
They don't want these kinds of guys talking about what they know.
And for that, a little girl paid the price.
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June 9, 2006
Nothing New About Haditha
What is it that makes the Marine massacre of civilians at Haditha such a big issue, when we had much worse massacres going on before our eyes much earlier?
The biggest of these was the giant massacre that took place over the course of two weeks in the 300,000-population city of Fallujah in November, 2004
Recall that the Marines--the service that, if we are to believe the propaganda coming out of the Pentagon, have such high standards where civilians are involved--surrounded the city and ordered everyone except the fighters to leave.
The plan was to kill everyone who was left, and that's what they did.
The problem is that they also were extremely loose in terms of how they defined that "everyone."
At the time, on the eve of the assault that leveled the entire city, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins reported that troops were stopping every person who was trying to flee the city and checking them for traces of powder on their hands. Those found to have residues were turned around and sent back to what would be the killing ground. But he reported that those males over the aged of 12 were also turned back, whether they had powder traces on their hands or not.
In other words, the Marines encircling the doomed city decided that all males who were teenagers or older were presumed combatants.
The official tally of dead in Fallujah at the end of the slaughter is 6000, but that is surely too low of a figure. Buildings were leveled by intense bombing and shelling, and nobody was sifting through the wreckage afterwards counting bodies. In fact, much of the city was bulldozed by American forces immediately after the assault, meaning that many bodies will never be found.
We also were treated to a video, taken by an embedded ABC cameraman, which showed a Marine entering a house where several alleged Iraqi fighters were lying, badly wounded, on the floow. The Marine executed them all with "two clicks" to the head. He was later located and exonerated by military "justice," which accepted his lame excuse that one of the wounded men moved, and might have been hiding a weapon under his shattered body.
All of these things that occurred in Fallujah were war crimes. The very invasion of Fallujah was a major war crime, as the assault was at bottom an act of vengeance and retaliation for the attack in that city earlier in the year on four mercenaries working for the U.S., in which the men were killed and their bodies publicly mutilated. Such revenge upon a city in response to an attack from people in the city is banned under international law, and is a gross war crime.
There were accounts from reporters and from residents of Americans shooting fleeing residents as they tried to swim across the river, even when they were holding up white cloths. The marines attacked a hospital, arrested doctors and dragged wounded inmates from their beds. This was also a war crime.
The Pentagon belatedly admitted to using banned white phosphorus incendiary weapons against the city--weapons that burned enemy fighters and innocent trapped civilians alike to horrible deaths. The U.S. military's own rules say phosphorus cannot be used even against enemy troops. Yet it was used. There is evidence that napalm, also a banned weapon, was used.
The interesting question is why this one massacre in Haditha is now getting such media attention, while the mainstream media and the Congress completely ignored the much grosser Fallujah attrocities that happened less than two years earlier.
Clearly, the massacre at Fallujah, and the many other attrocities and killings that have left tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, including many babies and children, dead at the hands of U.S. troops, are not, as Haditha is being portrayed, the work of a few monsters or of a few troops who's flipped from the stress of battle. The scale of the killings is so great it has to be seen as policy--whether overt or encouraged by a wink and a turned head.
The blame, as in the case of torture, must not be allowed to stay at the enlisted level, or even at the middle ranks. It should be traced out to its source, which is the Secretary of Defense and the Commander in Chief, for it is Rumsfeld and Bush who, in trashing the Geneva Conventions and in looking for ways to get around those civilizing rules or war, have made Haditha, and Fallujah, the norm.
For this, both men should be removed from office and tried for war crimes.
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June 1, 2006
Bush and Rumsfeld as Ethics Teachers?!
This Bush Administration just keeps on topping itself when it comes to outrages.
Now, after the press exposed a couple of cases of civilian massacres by U.S. forces--massacres the military tried to cover up--they’re calling for "ethics training" for the troops in Iraq.
Note that we are now more than three years into the slaughter, with our own forces responsible for the needless deaths of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children (the president himself has casually acknowledged "30,000 civilians dead, give or take").
Note that the administration--including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Commander-in-Chief Bush himself--are responsible for the "rules of engagement" that have led to most of those deaths--the aerial "shock and awe" bombardment of populated cities, the leveling of cities like Samarah and especially Fallujah, the use of prohibited incendiary weapons like napalm and white phosphorus, the use of fixed-wing and helicopter gunships that saturate wide areas with lethal machine-gun fire, and not least the deadly tactics of "spray and pray" response to attack, and to shoot-to-kill orders at military roadblocks.
This administration's talking about teaching ethics to soldiers is something akin to having the Israeli military or Hamas teach non-violent conflict resolution tactics, or having Attorney General Alberto Gonzales teach a course on civil liberties and the Bill of Rights.
This administration's idea of ethics is to redefine torture to permit waterboarding and the use of 24-hour stress positions.
This administration's idea of ethics is to round up legal alien residents in the U.S., including people who were given asylum because of persecution in their home country, and to deport them back to those countries without a legal hearing.
This administration's idea of ethics is to take the most vile symbol of repression in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Abu Ghraib Prison, and to convert it into a torture center for U.S. forces to use on captured Iraqis.
This administration's idea of ethics is to kidnap people, both here in the U.S., and overseas, and to "render" them in secret to dank, dark gulags in former totalitarian states of Eastern Europe, and at Guantanamo Bay, there to torture them and even kill them at will, while hiding them and their fate from even the International Red Cross.
This administration's idea of ethics is to kidnap, render and torture people, and eventually release them when it is finally demonstrated that they have a case of mistaken identity, and then to refuse to admit the mistake or even offer compensation.
This administration's idea of ethics is to lie to its own people in order to be able to start a war against a nation that posed no threat, for purely domestic political advantage.
The point is, we're talking about an administration of war criminals--people who should be indicted and put on trial, or, in Bush's case, impeached and then indicted and put on trial, for crimes against humanity. And these guys have the gall to call for the teaching of ethics to the poor troops it has thrown into a pointless and hopeless war and occupation in Iraq?
Are we supposed to take this seriously?
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May 30, 2006
Democratic Death Wish
Do national and congressional Democrats have a death wish?
In the course of flogging my new book, The Case for Impeachment, I’m coming to the conclusion that they must. And that's even before they do something stupid like support the nomination of General Michael Hayden to head the CIA.
Rank-and-file Democrats want--badly want--to see President Bush get impeached. So do independents. I hear it from everyone I meet. It's the rare Democrat or progressive or even independent who says she or he doesn't agree with the idea of impeachment, and even then, it's because such people are misinformed themselves and think that while they personally would love to see Bush get dragged into a big impeachment investigation, the rest of America wouldn't like it to happen.
That seems to be the wrong-headed thinking of the Democratic Party leadership. Both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) have vowed that if Democrats retake the House and/or Senate, that there will be no impeachment of the president attempted. Both leaders of the House and Senate election campaigns, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) have actively worked to undermine the primary candidacies of aggressive candidates who favor impeachment. These political cowards and sell-outs claim that what the voters want is for Democrats to press ahead in a positive way with their "agenda," forgetting that they really don't have an agenda, and that in any event, whatever bills they pass will simply be cancelled by the president, who will simply issue a "signing statement" invalidating their legislation.
The point, though, is that these sorry leaders are all wrong. The broad mass of the American public wants to be shed of this disastrous administration, and does not want to have to endure two more years of war, deceit, incompetence and politicization of every issue.
In a poll taken in January by the respected Zogby organization, 52 percent of Americans across the nation said they wanted to see President Bush impeached if he authorized the NSA domestic spying campaign. In all sectors of the country, red and blue, support for impeachment on the spying issue alone was 50 percent or higher. Among Democrats, support for impeachment was 60 percent, but interestingly, this was not statistically different from the 59 percent of independents who also favored impeachment.
Last November, Zogby did a similar nationwide poll, asking people if they thought that Bush should be impeached if he lied about the justification for invading Iraq. Again, 53 percent of Americans across the nation favored impeachment. That time, 70 percent of Democrats, 50 percent of independents, and even 29 percent of Republicans favored impeachment.
Clearly, if the Democrats want to take back Congress this November, they have a simple and gut-felt issue that will rally the voters and get them to the polls, and in numbers that would make theft of the election difficult.
So what are the Democratic strategists doing?
They're throwing impeachment out the window.
Smart folks these Democratic leaders.
So what can those who want impeachment to be a priority after Election Day this coming November do?
Start donating money to impeachment groups like Impeachpac.com. Start contributing directly to the congressional campaigns of candidates like Charles Owens (New York), Tony Trupiano (Michigan) and Jeeni Criscenzo, who have annoyed the Democratic Party leadership by stating that they will promptly introduce bills of impeachment if elected this fall.
The Case for Impeachment, and maybe buy a second copy to send to their local member of Congress.
People could also start calling their own local members of Congress—Democrat or Republican—and urging them to support impeachment. Letters to the editor, calling for impeachment, and urging local papers to cover the growing impeachment movement, would also be useful.
The public clearly wants impeachment, but a DemocraticParty that has completely lost touch with its grass roots base needs to be put on notice that it is going to lose in November, yet again, if it doesn’t get behind this simple, straightforward issue.
The American people understand that this president is a danger to the country, and a threat to the Republic. The American people realize that this president and his administration have been a wrecking ball, destroying the military, America's image abroad, the national economy, the education system, the healthcare system, pensions and the lives of ordinary working Americans. They want an opposition party that will excise this cancer.
What kind of party leadership would ignore such an angry demand for action?
What kind of voters would stay loyal to a party that has such pathetic leadership?
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May 29, 2006
A Memorial Mothers' Day Note
Memorial Day brought me an angry call form my usually upbeat and cheerful mother, who expressed outrage that the Memorial day celebrations honoring America’s war dead and war heroes rarely if ever mentions the women who served and in some cases died serving their country. We hear about Rosie the Rivetter, but not about Nancy the Navy WAVE.
Well, my mom spent two years during World War II as one of 80,000 Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), mostly based at the Naval Station in New York City.
Like the rest of the women in this group, she wore a Navy uniform, did the jobs that men had done previously--everything from clerical jobs to aircraft mechanic--and like them she got shortchanged when it came to post-war benefits. Where my Marine father qualified for a home loan, a year’s unemployment benefits, and college tuition, my mother got a small lump sum payment and that was it--at least until the American Legion made the government even things out for women...and for African-American vets.
Now she and the other women who gave up college or job to volunteer for the war effort in World War II are being ignored again as politicians praise the men who fought and gave their lives in the war against fascism.
And it's not just Navy women (who incidentally had to be 21 and single to be allowed to join in those days. The Army had its own even larger women's unit in World War II, the WACs, for Women’s Army Corps, which ultimately had 150,000 members. (Women had been in the Navy in World War I, but had then been banished for 23 years, until the WAVES were established in 1942. For the Army, 1942 was the first time women had ever been permitted to wear a uniform.
Especially today, when women are being sent into battle and are dying along with the men in a pointless imperial war in the Middle East, it's time for women to get the recognition they deserve for their role in the Second World War.
Thanks mom.
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May 28, 2006
Joyce & Dave Lindorff's Impeachmint Punch
A Drink to read The Case for Impeachment to, or to serve at Impeachment parties:
"Packs a wallop, unlike Congressional Democrats"
for six:
4 oz water
2 tablespoons confectioners sugar (dissolve in the water)
2.5 oz. Fresh lemon juice (concentrate if necessary)
7 oz. light rum
3 oz. Cognac (French, but quality not important)
3/4 oz. Peach liqueur or brandy
1 leaf or sprig fresh mint
Mix and allow to sit two hours in freezer or refrigerator. Serve on ice
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for impeachment parties:
22 oz. Water
11 tablespoons confectioners sugar
13 oz. Fresh lemon juice
37 oz. light rum
16 oz. Cognac
4 oz. Peach liqueur or brandy
Serve in glasses with a leaf or sprig of fresh mint
Be sure and ask for it at your local watering hole!
(Modified from Si Fisk's Fishhouse Punch recipe.)
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May 24, 2006
General Hayden: A Yes-Man for All Seasons
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI), in his polite manner, stated clearly what the rest of the Senate and most of the American media have not had the courage to say: Gen. Michael Hayden, as head of the National Security Agency, ran "an illegal program that put Americans on American soil under surveillance without the legally required approval of a judge."
What makes Feingold's statement about prospective CIA director Hayden’s criminal behavior--and by logical extension about President Bush's criminal behavior, since this is a program that was sought by and authorized by the president by his own admission--so important is that Feingold, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was belatedly briefed about the program by Hayden himself.
While most Republicans in the Senate just echo President Bush's self-serving mantra about the need to "protect the American people" from terror attacks, and most Democrats stay timidly silent, Sen. Feingold has put the issue clearly, saying, "Our country needs a CIA director who is committed to fighting terrorism aggressively without breaking the law or infringing on the rights of Americans. General Hayden's role in implementing and publicly defending the warrantless surveillance program does not give me confidence that he is capable of fulfilling this most important responsibility." As Barbara Olshansky and I write in our new book The Case for Impeachment, the argument that the president is free to break the law and violate the Constitution in pursuit of terrorists because the country is in a "war on terror,”" is dangerous nonsense:
The so-called 'War on Terror' is a police-state action against stateless terrorists--and as such it has no beginning and no end. If we were to accept the president's claim that it is a war, and that this justifies making him a de-facto dictator and Congress and the Courts vestigial, we are permanently revoking the Constitution and all the rights and the checks and balances that the Founders so carefully put in place.
The president is dead wrong.
The Constitution was not just conceived as a document for the good times. It was meant to guide the nation through times of conflict, trouble, and stress as well.
General Hayden has forgotten this truth, if he ever believed it in the first place, as well as his oath to "uphold and defend the Constitution." Most of the members of Congress have forgotten too. Sadly, all too many Americans have forgotten it as well.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that the NSA spying, and spying that is being conducted by the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, is not about catching terrorists, but is about the same kinds of things that it was about back during the COINTELPRO days of Richard Nixon: political espionage and the destruction of political dissent.
Sen. Feingold is right: Gen. Hayden, a yes-man to Bush Constitutional abuses and crimes, should not be made director of the CIA.
But Feingold should go a step further and demand Gen. Hayden be put in the dock and forced to testify about those crimes in full.
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Why They Hate Us...Reason #1003
US A-10 attack planes recently bombed an Afghan village in the dead of night for several hours, killing nearly 100 people, at least 16 of them acknowledged to have been innocent men, women and children.
The Pentagon is claiming that 20 of the dead were Taliban fighters, though the accuracy of their information is open to question since the Pentagon is also claiming that as many as 60 others of the dead "may have been" Taliban fighters. Of course, they equally may not have been.
Now, in a version of the notorious brutal cop's claim that the victim of his abuse "kept ramming his head into my baton," Pentagon spokesman Col. Tom Collins says, "The ultimate cause of why civilians were injured and killed is because the Taliban knowingly, willfully chose to occupy homes of these people."
Notice that he's not even saying that the victims invited or allowed the Taliban into their homes. In fact, according to reports, it appears that the Taliban forced their way into civilian homes in order to try to escape U.S. attacks.
What Collins and the Pentagon conveniently forget is that the Geneva Codes require military forces to adhere to the doctrine of proportionality. If an enemy hides among non-combatants--especially where these include women and children--the attacking force must forgo attacking unless there is a compelling military justification. To take an extreme case, it would clearly be a war crime to bomb a school full of children just to kill a single enemy soldier hiding in the building.
Since the U.S. knowingly bombed houses in a village and killed at least 16 and wounded another 15 Afghan civilians in this latest attack, and since the military says it has only confirmed killing 20 Taliban fighters, it's understandable that the Pentagon would be trying to claim another 60 Taliban deaths. A ratio of 16 civilians for 20 enemy fighters is hardly "proportionality." It is more like a massacre.
And people keep asking this stupid question: Why do they hate us?"
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May 23, 2006,
Impeachment: The Winning Argument
In the course of flogging our new book, The Case for Impeachment, it's becoming clear to me that for people on the left, just about everything this president has done is considered impeachable--a sentiment I and my co-author Barbara Olshansky share.
But it's hard to convince many more conservative people that the president should be tossed out because he lied about the war (they'll argue that he believed the cooked evidence), or because he has authorized torture or started a war of choice (9-11 and all that).
It's equally hard to get most conservatives worked up about the NSA spying, which they'll say is needed to go after terrorists. Never mind that the NSA would have no problem getting a court okay to do that, so clearly the spying is for something much more unsavory, like hunting down government leakers who are embarrassing the government, or spying on the so-called "opposition" party, or on anti-war activists.
But I find one argument to be very compelling for conservatives of almost all stripes, and that's Bush's overturning or revoking or ignoring of over 750 acts passed by Congress during his two terms of office.
When I point out to these people that if Bush is allowed to invalidate acts of Congress with the stroke of a pen with a bogus claim that he has special powers in his self-defined role as Commander in Chief, then the next president, who could well be a Democrat--indeed who could be (gasp!) Al Gore, John Kerry or, god forbid, that arch-demon of the conservative firmament, Hillary Clinton, they suddenly sit up and pay attention.
Here is an unimpeachable impeachment argument to try on your rabid right Uncle Fred at the next family picnic.
Trust me, it works wonderfully.
The odd thing is it doesn't seem to work on the lame-o's in the Democratic Party leadership. They're still running from impeachment as fast as they can, claiming against all evidence and polling that the public doesn't want "all that divisiveness." They're saying, like House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, that Democrats need to focus on their "agenda," whatever that is.
But what I want to know is this: Let's just suppose that somehow the Democrats manage to win the 15 additional seats that they need in order to take over the House in November. Let's say they do even better than expected, and pick up a health majority of 25-30 seats. Now, supposedly, they would be able to pursue that liberal (are we allowed to say that?) agenda. So they would pass bills maybe banning oil exploration on the Alaskan north slope, make Medicare drugs cheaper, legalize stem cell research and maybe slap mileage mandates on cars.
And the president would issue signing orders setting those acts aside or gutting their main provisions, as he has done with torture bans, the establishment of an independent inspector to examine corruption, and numerous other congressionally passed measures.
In other words, as long as this president, holds his delusional view of executive power, it won't matter if the Democrats take the House or even both houses of Congress. He must be removed from office.
The president must be impeached for rank and blatant abuse of power in subverting the very basis of the republic. The Founders envisioned a tripartite government in which Congress, elected directly by the people, legislates, and the President implements. This president has decided that he can assume the power to legislate, too, by deciding which laws, or portions of laws, passed by Congress, he will implement.
No nation where a leader claims and is allowed to exercise that kind of power can call itself dem