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Let me state from the outset: I have no problem with soldiers who inflate or embellish their war stories, any more than I am bothered by anybody who likes to spice up the tale of a youthful exploit.

It’s different though, when exaggerations our outright fictions are exploited for personal gain, like what Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal successfully campaigned for the US Senate on the outrageous claim that he was a Vietnam War combat veteran, when he really wasn’t.

My grandfather, William Lindorff, earned a Silver Star in World War I, where he was an ambulance driver on the front lines in France. My father, a Marine in World War II, says that his dad never once talked about that medal. Now, I’d say that’s a real hero.

David Christian, on the other hand, who ran twice unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress in Pennsylvania, has talked a lot about his own heroism as a soldier in Vietnam. In fact he’s written (with author William Hoffer), a book about his exploits, titled Victor Six. A cover blurb from the Philadelphia Inquirer touts him (perhaps a bit excessively, given Marine Gen. Smedley Butler’s unparalleled two Congressional Medals of Honor), as “this country’s most decorated war hero.”

I’m not going to challenge Christian’s tales of his heroic actions in Nam, where his website claims he won two Silver Stars, but some of his other stories, particularly one  he recently told to blustery conservative radio talk-show host and local newspaper columnist Michael Smerconish, do merit a little examination, and raise questions about what Stephen Colbert would call his general “truthiness.”
David Christian, Michael Smerconish and Kevin Ferris

“Pakistan must do more.”

That statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has become a laugh line in Pakistani drawing rooms.
The 9/11 attacks resulted in 2,996 deaths — 246 on the planes,2606 in towers and on ground, 126 at the Pentagon. The attacks justified an invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraq War and also attacks on the America’s “ally in war on terror,” Pakistan.

The US has come a long way since. The policy of extrajudicial killings survived the Bush/Cheney era and has intensified from an estimated 45 attacks under Bush to 200 under Obama.

Few of those killed in these attacks have been militants. Most have been civilians. Indeed, according to the New American Foundation, only 2% of deaths have been of militants. But hey, that’s ok. That’s why the term “collateral damage” was coined, right?

The Pakistan Army has been engaged in a non-conventional war since 2001, resulting in millions being displaced and in civil amenities being destroyed. Yet there is now increasing pressure from the US on Pakistan to have out army target the region of our own country called North Waziristan.

Pakistan, the US says, needs to “do more.”

Or else!

In an article carried by the Pakhtoonistan Gazette on 10th April 2011, Muhammad Tahir comments on a White House report claiming that Pakistan has no “clear path” to defeat militants on its soil.

My humble submission, dear readers, is: Neither does the USA.

However, Pakistan needs to “do more.”
US drone attacks in Pakistan are killing mostly civilians, plus any lingering affection for America

Some years ago, I was photographing a constitutional law professor for a magazine article on his book, and while I composed my shots I employed the usual half-minded topical banter to keep things on course. The professor was pretty progressive and knew I was a veteran antiwar activist. I was muttering something about constitutional rights.

In the lens, I noticed him chuckling at something, so I pulled my eye away from the camera and looked at him. He was grinning now.

“John, you know they abrogated the Constitution long ago,” he said, his tone a bit patronizing but also mixed with camaraderie and humor.

“Oh, yeh!” I said. “I forgot about that.” We both laughed, and I went on with the shoot.

I couldn’t help thinking about that conversation as I read the story in The New York Times about the new powers being given to individual FBI agents to snoop on citizens they subjectively deem dangerous.

Is the FBI giving its agents too much rope to follow their inner Harry Callahan?

As a veteran anti-war activist and blogster critical of my government, I took this news somewhat personally, since, according to the Times report, without getting permission or making a report, FBI agents could sneak around the back of my house at night and fish through my garbage cans. They could do this if they thought there might be information in those cans useful to intimidate me to snitch on someone. (For the record, I’m not uncomfortable with an FBI agent going through the rancid chicken parts and feces from our cat’s litter box. I have nothing to hide.)

Apparently, individual FBI agents are also now empowered to meddle with me and other writers on this blog in ways I can only imagine — if they deem that necessary. It has to do with the blogosphere and the First Amendment. According to the Times, the new rules clarify for agents just who is a “legitimate member of the news media” on the internet and who is not. The Times reports that “prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs.” I presume “count” means that a blog is deemed to have First Amendment rights.

As a boy I knew old Lonnie Chase, who clammed for a living in the waters of Cape Cod.  Not known for his erudition, his words were short and pithy.  I remember his response to my question regarding the weather. After gazing skyward, seeming to be pondering the clouds,  he would always answer, “Might rain, then ‘gin, might not.”
 


Was Lonnie being a wise man  or a fool?  I choose the first.  From sitting hours in his dingy in the bay, he had learned to trust ambiguity.  For him, there was something controlling the weather that was unpredictable, something his Indian blood told him was beyond our understanding. 
 

Lonnie had never gone to school, and he couldn’t even write his name, yet he was a superb craftsman of small boats.  I marveled at his obese frame as he’d sit by the stove chewing tobacco, a spittoon beside him, as he and his friend Long John discussed things beyond the ability of a ten-year-old boy to grasp.  A few adults sensed his worth as a member of the local community, but thanks to his unkempt ways, most characterized him as a local one-man blight on the neighborhood.
 

There are others who are more famously hard to characterize when it comes to wisdom. Take Einstein, whose often peculiar and errant behavior also included a strong display of wisdom.  I had once thought of writing that knowledge and wisdom were mutually exclusive, the one being occluded by the other, but Einstein gives the lie to such an assertion.
 


In his case we have the element of genius, of course.  But van Gogh, also a genius, demonstrates that genius and wisdom don’t necessarily go hand in hand.  
 
 How about wisdom and age, then, which is really the subject of this article?
Sidharta: A wise man or a fool?

Federal Judge Filipe Restrepo, a man with a solid history as a defender of civil liberties and civil rights, and a defense attorney by training and private practice experience, seems sadly to have gotten a bit thin-skinned and power-happy after donning the robes of a federal judge.

As my colleague Linn Washington wrote earlier this week, the judge lost it when Hampton Coleman had the effrontery to write a 28-word letter to Restrepo questioning the judge’s integrity and his commitment to “blind justice,” and warning that “we the people” would be “watching and listening very carefully” to the judge.

In response to that angry but innocuous letter (prompted by Coleman’s feeling that the judge had been unfair to his nephew, a detective who had brought a racial harassment case against his employer, the Montgomery County, PA district attorney), Judge Restrepo dispatched two members of the US Federal Marshals Service to make an early morning visit to Coleman. At Coleman’s house, they reportedly accused him of sending a “threatening” letter to the judge, and warned him not to send any more. (As Washington recounts, when Coleman asked the marshals about his First Amendment rights, they told him the Constitution was “an old document” and that it was “irrelevant.”)

I would argue that when a federal judge thinks that receiving a letter from a citizen telling him to honor the Constitution and warning him that the public will be “watching and listening” to his actions in court constitutes a possible criminal act that calls for a threatening home visit by US Marshals, that judge has himself become a threat to a free society.

Interestingly, another of my colleagues here at ThisCantBeHappening!, John Grant, says that a PDF file put out by Judge Restrepo’s own office says that “Judge Restrepo permits correspondence with the Court on all matters.”

Fair enough! I am calling for our readers here at ThisCantBeHappening! to take him up on that invitation, and to let the judge know in no uncertain terms that it’s not just Hampton Coleman who is going to be watching and listening to his actions and decisions on the federal bench here in Philadelphia. We are Hampton Coleman!

“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

This 1954 quote from Albert Einstein hangs on the wall in my house. It seems to me truth distilled down to its most humble and indisputable essence. The more I read it, the more fundamental and inescapable its wisdom seems.

While we feel like “a part limited in time and space,” that sense of being apart is, Einstein says, a delusion upon which collectives, nations and empires are built. And, by extension, how wars are fomented and maintained.

We all naturally gravitate to these delusional human prisons. To a certain extent, they’re unavoidable. In my mind, they dovetail with the classic definition of tragedy as a case of someone or some group meeting a destructive or fatal end rooted in their own decisions. “[T]hey die and are not happy through their own efforts … as a condition contained in the effort,” says Oscar Mandel in A Definition Of Tragedy.

Humans gather and foist notions upon themselves that they are “exceptional” or “the chosen people” or “beloved of God” or just richer and more powerful and more deserving than some other people whose prison is constructed of very different delusions, in some cases based on being victimized. Religions are notorious for maintaining delusional prisons in this respect.

A few weeks ago I was accused by a left-leaning, pro-Palestinian activist of spouting simplistic, “new age” ideas. Certainly Einstein’s view of humanity’s place in the universe can easily be ridiculed as New Age. And, like anything, Einstein’s idea might even be used to create a separate clique of superior initiates – a secular-humanist cult.

The fact even Einstein might be the root of some delusional prison does not mean the point Einstein is trying to make in this quote is not serious and is somehow out-to-lunch. To me — a 25-year veteran peace activist – what he says is the crux of all serious peace-making in the world. It’s also the bane of intractable international conflicts like the one in the Middle East.

A Palestinian and an Israeli face-to-face

My relationship with Israel and its policies reaches back to late 1967 following the June Six-Day War. I remember standing outside a bunker in a firebase west of Pleiku, Vietnam, discussing with a Jewish soldier in my unit the wisdom of the Israeli settlement movement being established in the just-conquered West Bank. As best I can recall, the conversation went like this:

“That land belongs to Jews and to Israel,” he said. He may have referred to the West Bank area as the Biblical Judea and Samaria.

“It also belongs to the people who live there,” I said.

“They were about to attack Israel, and they lost the war. Israel has the right to settle the area.”

“Sending in settlers is nuts. You know down the line it’s all gonna come back and bite Israel. It’ll end up just like here – an occupation.”

My Jewish friend would have none of it, of course. Like many Jews, he was locked deep in that Einsteinian prison of delusion that says Jews and Israel are justified in doing whatever they do because of security and because of the holocaust in Europe and their long, terrible history of being oppressed and fragmented as a people. Israel is about being tough and no longer being a chump in the world. Plus, Zionist Jews made the desert bloom.

Hampton Coleman, a military veteran, felt secure in his constitutional free speech rights until a few weeks ago when three U.S. Marshals showed up at his Delaware home issuing demands Coleman considered threats.

Those U.S. Marshals, two male and one female from Philadelphia, came to Coleman’s home last month accusing him of sending a threatening letter to a federal magistrate judge.

“Why would I put my name and address on a letter containing a threat? I’m not crazy,” Coleman said during a recent interview.

Those Marshals warned Coleman to not send any more letters to U.S. Magistrate L. Felipe Restrepo.
Coleman claims the Marshals service is overreacting to his three-sentence, 28-word letter voicing concern about bias he felt Restrepo had exhibited in a race discrimination case handled by that judge, who ordinarily has a reputation for fairness.

Coleman attended an April 2011 hearing in that case.

Coleman said when he asked the three Marshals about his supposed Constitutional right to freedom of speech, “one of the marshals said “that’s an old document.” Coleman said that response startled him implying that the U.S. Constitution is “irrelevant.”

The five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution include barring the federal government from “abridging the freedom of speech” and from blocking “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Coleman’s chilling encounter with those Marshals comes at a time when some experts and individuals across America are raising alarms about actions by governmental entities which are eroding Constitutional rights under the cloak of counterterrorism. Recent actions include revelations about surveillance of activists by FBI agents, court rulings limiting Bill of Rights protections and recent congressional renewal of the rights- curtailing Patriot Act.

Persons attempting “to exercise their rights will often be forced to defend themselves against an increasingly inflexible and uncompromising government,” warns John W. Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organization, in a recent commentary.
The First Amendment: Just "an old document"?

It was just as recently as a year ago that the authorities in politics, business and academe were stating boldly and confidently that the nation’s economy was on the mend, and that there was no chance of a backslide into recession again.

Take Lakshman Achuthan and Anirvan Banerji who are, respectively, co-founder and chief operating officer and co-founder and chief research officer of ECRI, the Economic Cycle Research Institute.

“The good news is that the much-feared double-dip recession is not going to happen,” they said on CNN on Oct. 28, last year. “After completing an exhaustive review of key drivers of the business cycle, ranging from credit to inventories and measures of labor market conditions, we can forecast with confidence that the economy will avoid a double dip.”

“We will not have a double-dip recession at all,” said Warren Buffett, the multi-billionaire investor called, by his fans, the Oracle of Omaha, back on September 13, 2010. “I see business coming back almost across the board,” he told an assembled group of bankers.

And of course, there was Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who actually acts on his presumed wisdom, saying, on June 8, 2010, “”There seems to be a good bit of momentum in consumer spending and investment,” he said at the time. “My best guess is we’ll have a continued recovery [but] it won’t feel terrific.”

Even a Vistage Survey of CEOs, conducted release last Oct. 4, showed the confidence index respondents, all top executives at public companies, saying there was “no evidence” for a double dip back into recession in the nation’s economic future.

So much for expert opinion.
Job loss record of current and previous recessions

Cupar, Scotland–This county town of Fife, is not exactly a news hot spot. Probably the last big story here was the landing of Italian balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi nearby in 1785 at the end of a 43-mile flight from Edinburgh.

However the small town’s sleepy Sheriff court is about to host a key legal case involving a US student from New York and two anti Israeli protestors who have been charged with racism.

For the information of US readers, in Scotland the Sheriff isn’t some John Wayne figure with the star on his chest, but is rather the bewigged judge presiding over the local court.

This case centers on an incident at nearby St. Andrews University, where two students are facing racially aggravated conduct charges after allegedly making comments and gestures critical of the State of Israel
and its flag.

Press reports are already in danger of prejudging the case, with headlines such as the one reading “St. Andrews University students in court to face anti-Semitism charges” that ran in the local daily, The Courier.

According to one of the charged students, Paul Donnachie, “Whilst in the room at the student residences of an individual who I considered a friend, Chanan Reitblat, I placed my hands down the front of my
jeans and onto an Israeli flag which belonged to him, accompanied by comments to the effect that Israel is a terrorist state, and is guilty of many civilian deaths.”

He continued, “The action was not malicious. However, it sparked a great deal of political debate amongst our group of friends within our Hall of Residence, whereby the nature of the State of Israel was
discussed.”
The Cupar Sheriff's Court will decide if protesting Israel's military is 'anti-Semitic'

Amid all the nonsense and gobbledegook that has been written about banking industry and about the economic slump during the last four years of the global financial crisis, New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson has stood out both for the clarity of her analysis, and for her willingness to go after the guilty parties in the political and especially the banking system, naming names and calling it as she sees it.

So it was kind of disappointing–even shocking–to read her latest article reporting on a new “study” by Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Joseph Gagnon, warning about the nation’s growing debt crisis.

The Peterson Institute, founded by Wall Street tycoon Peter Peterson, has long been gunning for the Social Security and Medicare systems, which he, and the rest of the Wall Street gang, see as unfairly competing with Wall Street for the assets of the public, and as destructive of the “free market.”

Peterson’s basic schtick is that the two critical support systems for the elderly and infirm are going to bankrupt the country as they pay out benefits that exceed what retirees paid into the system, and that the solution is to cut back on those benefits, increase the taxes collected, or better, to privatize both systems.

Given Peterson’s and his institute’s long-standing agenda to gut Social Security and Medicare, it’s not surprising that Gagnon, as a fellow there, would say the solution to the nation’s growing debt is to either raise taxes or cut those two hugely successful, critically important and broadly popular social programs.

Morgenson is too smart not to know better, and yet not once in her article did she look outside of Gagnon’s narrow definition of the problem at the real cause of the national debt: the country’s outlandish military budget and a decade of unfunded wars, which have been piling up debt at a rate of some $150 billion a year (and that’s just the principal!).
Real cause of the deficit: the Pentagon, not "Entitlements"