“There was never a good war, or a bad peace.” — Benjamin Franklin
Clint Romesha was awarded the Medal of Honor Monday by President Obama, but with “mixed emotions” as he thought about his fallen American comrades in Afghanistan. As is typical in these situations, Romesha was repeatedly described as a “hero.” Sorry, I don’t buy it.
That same day there was a memorial service for legendary Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, apparently killed by a mentally unbalanced fellow soldier he was trying to help. Kyle was honored as the military’s deadliest sniper, having killed at least 160 enemy soldiers in Iraq. The term “hero” was freely used for this extraordinary marksman. In this case, too, I don’t buy it.
I cannot accept the concept of “heroes” in combat. I cringe whenever soldiers are glorified, no matter the circumstances. In the words of Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier of WWI, “War is organized murder, and nothing else.” There is nothing heroic about killing for your country, especially since World War II, our last legally declared war. Soldiers are victims for sure, but not heroes. There is nothing glorious about killing in wartime. War is senseless, stupid, and as William Tecumseh Sherman described it, “hell.”
I don’t doubt that Romesha and Kyle were exceptional and brave soldiers, and probably decent human beings. But no soldier should be considered a hero when his accomplishments involve killing “enemy combatants” who, when you come right down to it, are defending their country from foreign attackers (Americans) in our country’s lastest destructive, unnecessary, and bogus war/occupation.
Let’s not perpetuate the myth that our soldiers are defending American soil or preserving our freedoms. Again, you have to go back to WWII for that. However brave those two decorated men and thousands of other American soldiers were, the fact that they were invading foreign countries primarily for the benefit of oil companies and other multinational corporations does not earn them the right to be called “heroes.” As former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan admitted in his memoir The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
You can make a case that invading Afghanistan was justified, as they were harboring the al-Qaeda that planned 9/11. But we quickly took care of al-Qaeda, and replaced the Taliban government. Does anybody know a good reason why we’ve been occupying that sorry country for the last decade? Afghanistan and Iraq are just two of many examples of wasted lives and bodies in American wars, interventions, and occupations since the Second World War.
And unfortunately, referring to soldiers as heroes only perpetuates what is indefensible, namely the glorification of war, the most ignoble of all human enterprises. When soldiers are portrayed as warriors to be honored and admired, it encourages recruitment of future soldiers and the waging of future unnecessary armed conflict. I prefer the old saying: “suppose they gave a war and nobody came.” That would be a dream and a goal worth pursuing. Exalting the young men and women going overseas and risking their lives, limbs, and minds to kill foreigners in our name for the benefit of America’s corporate economic interests is dangerous and immoral.
The soldiers involved in our overseas conflicts today– no matter their fate, no matter how brave and able–are really just victims, never heroes. They shouldn’t be going around the world helping build an empire. They should be coming home.
“Man is a religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal with the true religion – several of them. He is the only animal who loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He had made a graveyard of the globe in doing his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to heaven and happiness.”
On Wednesday a few hundred activists crowded into the courtroom of the Second Circuit, the spillover room with its faulty audio feed and dearth of chairs, and Foley Square outside the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan where many huddled in the cold. The fate of the nation, we understood, could be decided by the three judges who will rule on our lawsuit against President Barack Obama for signing into law Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The section permits the military to detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, who “substantially support”—an undefined legal term—al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces,” again a term that is legally undefined. Those detained can be imprisoned indefinitely by the military and denied due process until “the end of hostilities.” In an age of permanent war this is probably a lifetime. Anyone detained under the NDAA can be sent, according to Section (c)(4), to any “foreign country or entity.” This is, in essence, extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens. It empowers the government to ship detainees to the jails of some of the most repressive regimes on earth.
Illustration by Mr. Fish
Section 1021(b)(2) was declared invalid in September after our first trial, in the Southern District Court of New York. The Obama administration appealed the Southern District Court ruling. The appeal was heard Wednesday in the Second Circuit Court with Judges Raymond J. Lohier, Lewis A. Kaplan and Amalya L. Kearse presiding. The judges might not make a decision until the spring when the Supreme Court rules in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, another case in which I am a plaintiff. The Supreme Court case challenges the government’s use of electronic surveillance. If we are successful in the Clapper case, it will strengthen all the plaintiffs’ standing in Hedges v. Obama. The Supreme Court, if it rules against the government, will affirm that we as plaintiffs have a reasonable fear of being detained.
If we lose in Hedges v. Obama—and it seems certain that no matter the outcome of the appeal this case will reach the Supreme Court—electoral politics and our rights as citizens will be as empty as those of Nero’s Rome. If we lose, the power of the military to detain citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military prisons will become a terrifying reality. Democrat or Republican. Occupy activist or libertarian. Socialist or tea party stalwart. It does not matter. This is not a partisan fight. Once the state seizes this unchecked power, it will inevitably create a secret, lawless world of indiscriminate violence, terror and gulags. I lived under several military dictatorships during the two decades I was a foreign correspondent. I know the beast.
“The stakes are very high,” said attorney Carl Mayer, who with attorney Bruce Afran brought our case to trial, in addressing a Culture Project audience in Manhattan on Wednesday after the hearing. “What our case comes down to is: Are we going to have a civil justice system in the United States or a military justice system? The civil justice system is something that is ingrained in the Constitution. It was always very important in combating tyranny and building a democratic society. What the NDAA is trying to impose is a system of military justice that allows the military to police the streets of America to detain U.S. citizens, to detain residents in the United States in military prisons. Probably the most frightening aspect of the NDAA is that it allows for detention until ‘the end of hostilities.’ ”
Five thousand years of human civilization has left behind innumerable ruins to remind us that the grand structures and complex societies we build, and foolishly venerate as immortal, crumble into dust. It is the descent that matters now. If the corporate state is handed the tools, as under Section 1021(b)(2) of the NDAA, to use deadly force and military power to criminalize dissent, then our decline will be one of repression, blood and suffering. No one, not least our corporate overlords, believes that our material conditions will improve with the impending collapse of globalization, the steady deterioration of the global economy, the decline of natural resources and the looming catastrophes of climate change.
But the global corporatists—who have created a new species of totalitarianism—demand, during our decay, total power to extract the last vestiges of profit from a degraded ecosystem and disempowered citizenry. The looming dystopia is visible in the skies of blighted postindustrial cities such as Flint, Mich., where drones circle like mechanical vultures. And in an era where the executive branch can draw up secret kill lists that include U.S. citizens, it would be naive to believe these domestic drones will remain unarmed.
Robert M. Loeb, the lead attorney for the government in Wednesday’s proceedings, took a tack very different from that of the government in the Southern District Court of New York before Judge Katherine B. Forrest. Forrest repeatedly asked the government attorneys if they could guarantee that the other plaintiffs and I would not be subject to detention under Section 1021(b)(2). The government attorneys in the first trial granted no such immunity. The government also claimed in the first trial that under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act (AUMF), it already had the power to detain U.S. citizens. Section 1021(b)(2), the attorneys said, did not constitute a significant change in government power. Judge Forrest in September rejected the government’s arguments and ruled Section 1021(b)(2) invalid.
The government, however, argued Wednesday that as “independent journalists” we were exempt from the law and had no cause for concern. Loeb stated that if journalists used journalism as a cover to aid the enemy, they would be seized and treated as enemy combatants. But he assured the court that I would be untouched by the new law as long as “Mr. Hedges did not start driving black vans for people we don’t like.”
Loeb did not explain to the court who defines an “independent journalist.” I have interviewed members of al-Qaida as well as 16 other individuals or members of groups on the State Department’s terrorism list. When I convey these viewpoints, deeply hostile to the United States, am I considered by the government to be “independent”? Could I be seen by the security and surveillance state, because I challenge the official narrative, as a collaborator with the enemy? And although I do not drive black vans for people Loeb does not like, I have spent days, part of the time in vehicles, with armed units that are hostile to the United States. These include Hamas in Gaza and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in southeastern Turkey.
I traveled frequently with armed members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador and the Sandinista army in Nicaragua during the five years I spent in Central America. Senior officials in the Reagan administration regularly denounced many of us in the press as fifth columnists and collaborators with terrorists. These officials did not view us as “independent.” They viewed us as propagandists for the enemy. Section 1021(b)(2) turns this linguistic condemnation into legal condemnation.
Alexa O’Brien, another plaintiff and a co-founder of the US Day of Rage, learned after WikiLeaks released 5 million emails from Stratfor, a private security firm that does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, that Stratfor operatives were trying to link her and her organization to Islamic radicals, including al-Qaida, and sympathetic websites as well as jihadist ideology. If that link were made, she and those in her organization would not be immune from detention.
Afran said at the Culture Project discussion that he once gave a donation at a fundraising dinner to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish Catholic organization. A few months later, to his surprise, he received a note of thanks from Sinn Féin. “I didn’t expect to be giving money to a group that maintains a paramilitary terrorist organization, as some people say,” Afran said. “This is the danger. You can easily find yourself in a setting that the government deems worthy of incarceration. This is why people cease to speak out.”
The government attempted in court last week to smear Sami Al-Hajj, a journalist for the Al-Jazeera news network who was picked up by the U.S. military and imprisoned for nearly seven years in Guantanamo. This, for me, was one of the most chilling moments in the hearing.
“Just calling yourself a journalist doesn’t make you a journalist, like Al-Hajj,” Loeb told the court. “He used journalism as a cover. He was a member of al-Qaida and provided Stinger missiles to al-Qaida.”
Al-Hajj, despite Loeb’s assertions, was never charged with any crimes. And the slander by Loeb only highlighted the potential for misuse of this provision of the NDAA if it is not struck down.
The second central argument by the government was even more specious. Loeb claimed that Subsection 1021(e) of the NDAA exempts citizens from detention. Section 1021(e) states: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.”
Afran countered Loeb by saying that Subsection 1021(e) illustrated that the NDAA assumed that U.S. citizens would be detained by the military, overturning two centuries of domestic law that forbids the military to carry out domestic policing. And military detention of citizens, Afran noted, is not permitted under the Constitution.
This country will never regain the democracy that’s been lost without getting money out of politics. But how? A constitutional amendment is the best way, but getting that through Congress isn’t realistic. The Constitution has given us another way that bypasses Congress in favor of the state legislators. Some progress is being made toward convening a constitutional convention for the purpose of amending the constitution to take the influence of big money out of the political system. Cenk Uygur and the Young Turks are behind one such effort, WolfPAC, which is attempting to do just that.
It’s called the U.S. Postal Service because it is a service, not a corporation. Who decided the Postal Service must be profitable? Do other government agencies, like the Defense Department and Department of Education, have to turn a profit? Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General and the Post Office has faithfully and effectively served the American people for over 237 years. But now it is under attack because, gasp, it’s losing money. Well, duh, the Republicans in 2006 made postal workers pre-fund their retirement 75 years in advance, making it nearly impossible for the USPS to make a profit. Let’s be honest: conservatives are at war with the Postal Service because they want its services privatized and they want to cripple one of the largest labor unions in the country. If Congress insists that the USPS be profitable, then the solution is simple. Raise the price of stamps a few cents. How difficult is that?
“You can’t be an American company only when you want a massive bailout from the American people. You have also got to be an American company, and pay your fair share of taxes, as we struggle with the deficit and adequate funding for the needs of the American people. If Wall Street and corporate America don’t agree, the next time they need a bailout let them go to the Cayman Islands, let them go to Bermuda, let them go to theBahamas and let them ask those countries for corporate welfare.”
The Bush regime’s response to 9/11 and the Obama regime’s validation of this response have destroyed accountable democratic government in the United States. So much unaccountable power has been concentrated in the executive branch that the US Constitution is no longer an operable document.
Whether a person believes the official story of 9/11 which rests on unproven government assertions or believes the documented evidence provided by a large number of scientists, first responders, and structural engineers and architects, the result is the same. 9/11 was used to create an open-ended “war on terror” and a police state. It is extraordinary that so many Americans believe that “it can’t happen here” when it already has.
We have had a decade of highly visible evidence of the construction of a police state: the PATRIOT Act, illegal spying on Americans in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the initiation of wars of aggression–war crimes under the Nuremberg Standard–based on intentional lies, the Justice Department’s concocted legal memos justifying the executive branch’s violation of domestic and international laws against torture, the indefinite detention of US citizens in violation of the constitutionally protected rights of habeas corpus and due process, the use of secret evidence and secret “expert witnesses” who cannot be cross-examined against defendants in trials, the creation of military tribunals in order to evade federal courts, secret legal memos giving the president authority to launch preemptive cyber attacks on any country without providing evidence that the country constitutes a threat, and the Obama regime’s murder of US citizens without evidence or due process.
As if this were not enough, the Obama regime now creates new presidential powers by crafting secret laws, refusing to disclose the legal reasoning on which the asserted power rests. In other words, laws now originate in secret executive branch memos and not in acts of Congress. Congress? We don’t need no stinking Congress.
Despite laws protecting whistleblowers and the media and the US Military Code which requires soldiers to report war crimes, whistleblowers such as CIA agent John Kiriakou, media such as Julian Assange, and soldiers such as Bradley Manning are persecuted and prosecuted for revealing US government crimes. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33804.htm[1] The criminals go free, and those who report the crimes are punished.
The justification for the American police state is the “war on terror,” a hoax kept alive by the FBI’s “sting operations.” Normally speaking, a sting operation is when a policewoman poses as a prostitute in order to ensnare a “John,” or a police officer poses as a drug dealer or user in order to ensnare drug users or dealers. The FBI’s “sting operation” goes beyond these victimless crimes that fill up US prisons.
The FBI’s sting operations are different. They are just as victimless as no plot ever happens, but the FBI doesn’t pose as bomb makers for terrorists who have a plot but lack the weapon. Instead, the FBI has the plot and looks for a hapless or demented person or group, or for a Muslim enraged over the latest Washington insult to him and/or his religion. When the FBI locates its victim, its agents approach the selected perpetrator pretending to be Al-Qaeda or some such and ply the selected perpetrator with money, the promise of fame, or threats until the victim signs on to the FBI’s plot and is arrested.
Trevor Aaronson in his book, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s War on Terrorism, documents that the FBI has so far concocted 150 “terrorist plots” and that almost all of the other “terrorist cases” are cases unrelated to terrorism, such as immigration, with a terror charge tacked on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LpTOrNQ3G9Q#! [2]The presstitute American media doesn’t ask why, if there is so much real terrorism requiring an American war against it, the FBI has to invent and solicit terrorist plots.
Neither does the media inquire how the Taliban, which resists the US invasion and attempted occupation of Afghanistan, fighting the US superpower to a standstill after 11 years, came to be designated as terrorists. Nor does the US presstitute media want to know how tribesmen in remote regions of Pakistan came to be designated as “terrorists” deserving of US drone attacks on the citizens, schools and medical clinics of a country with which the US is not at war.
Instead the media protects and perpetrates the hoax that has given America the police state. The American media has become Leni Riefenstahl, as has Hollywood with the anti-Muslim propaganda film, Zero Dark Thirty. This propaganda film is a hate crime that spreads Islamophobia. Nevertheless, the film is likely to win awards and to sink Americans into both tyranny and a hundred-year war in the name of fighting the Muslim threat.
What I learned many years ago as a professor is that movies are important molders of Americans‘ attitudes. Once, after giving a thorough explanation of the Russian Revolution that led to communist rule, a student raised his hand and said: “That’s not the way it happened in the movie.”
At first I thought he was making a witty joke, but then I realized that he thought that the truth resided in the movie, not in the professor who was well versed in the subject. Ever since I have been puzzled how the US has survived for so long, considering the ignorance of its population. Americans have lived in the power of the US economy. Now that this power is waning, sooner or later Americans will have to come to terms with reality.
It is a reality that will be unfamiliar to them.
Some Americans claim that we have had police states during other wartimes and that once the war on terror is won, the police state will be dismantled. Others claim that government will be judicious in its use of the power and that if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.
These are reassurances from the deluded. The Bush/Obama police state is far more comprehensive than Lincoln’s, Wilson’s, or Roosevelt’s, and the war on terror is open-ended and is already three times longer than World War II. The Police State is acquiring “squatter’s rights.”
Moreover, the government needs the police state in order to protect itself from accountability for its crimes, lies, and squandering of taxpayers‘ money. New precedents for executive power have been created in conjunction with the Federalist Society which, independent of the war on terror, advocates the “unitary executive” theory, which claims the president has powers not subject to check by Congress and the Judiciary. In other words, the president is a dictator if he prefers to be.
It’s called the U.S. Postal Service because it’s a service, not a corporation. Who decided the Postal Service must be profitable? Do other government agencies, like the Defense Department, the V.A., and the Department of Education, have to turn a profit? Of course not, so why should the Postal Service?
The story line you’ll hear from the corporate media is that the U.S. Postal Service is losing money and something drastic has to be done. But this is a manufactured crisis. In real life, the post office is an American success story. The Second Continental Congress created it in 1775 and made Benjamin Franklin the first Postmaster General. In fact, if you read Article One, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, you will find, under enumerated powers of Congress: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”
Gary Huck & Mike Konopaki/ Labor Cartoons
The Post Office has been humming along quite nicely since Ben got it started. Let’s face it, sending a letter from one address to a different address across town or clear across the country for less than two quarters is a pretty good deal by any reasonable standards. Most Americans appreciate their post office and the services it provides and are not anxious to see them cut or eliminated. The elderly, the disabled, and rural communities depend on the Postal Service for more than just junk mail and bills. The post office is a vital human connection to their community and the world. Many businesses also depend on regular postal service.
The latest proposed postal austerity measure, cutting Saturday delivery, will only make it harder for the USPS to survive. “The postmaster general cannot save the Postal Service by ending one of its major competitive advantages,” explains Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont. “Cutting six-day delivery is not a viable plan for the future. It will lead to a death spiral that will harm rural America while doing very little to improve the financial condition of the Postal Service.”
Despite over 237 years of unparalleled success and popularity, the U.S. Postal Service has been under siege for years by Republicans in Congress and by powerful interest groups in Washington. The reason the USPS is under attack is because it is a success story. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency six consecutive years and ranked the fourth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.
The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. And it provides a livable wage to over 574,000 mostly unionized workers. All of that doesn’t fit in with the right-wing mantra that government doesn’t work and government agencies should be replaced by private corporations.
True, it has been losing money recently, but you can blame Congress for that. Republicans in 2006 made postal workers pre-fund their health care retirement costs an unprecedented 75 years in advance–at a cost of over $5 billion a year over a decade–making it nearly impossible for the USPS to make a profit. That’s right, Congress was mandating payment of retirement health benefits to workers not even born yet. To make matters worse, Congress has resisted efforts to allow the Postal Service to recover billions of dollars of overpayments of pension payouts and expand into new areas of business.
Let’s be clear: conservatives are at war with the Postal Service because they want its services privatized to powerful companies like FedEx and UPS, and they want to cripple the labor unions that represent postal employees.
I’ll say it again: why does a popular government agency that has consistently and effectively served the American people for over two centuries and is a valued part of the American way of life need to make money?
Even if Congress insists that the USPS be profitable–which they shouldn’t–that problem can be readily solved: Raise the price of stamps a few cents. Now how difficult is that?
Also published in OpEdNews (headline status), February 8, 2013
She has compiled a first-of-its-kind report that tells the story of how the United States used its position to cajole, persuade, and strong-arm 54 other countries to take part in the CIA’s highly classified programs.
From Australia to Iran, Canada to Sweden, Hong Kong to Indonesia. The list is shocking.
Even though I—you—have heard many stories about what was done in the name of the war against terror, I found myself shocked again about what was done under the CIA’s secret programs after 9/11.
These are not the practices of an open society. Only with a full reckoning can the United States hope to close the door on this shameful chapter in its history.
