By Dave Lindorff

It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.

By Dave Lindorff

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Federal District Court
Judge Fernando Gaitan of the Missouri Western District Court have at
least two things in common: they are both appointees of President
Ronald Reagan, and they both think it’s just fine for the US to execute
innocent people. The same can be said for Judge C. Arlen Beam of the
8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a recent dissent in a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling ordering a habeas
hearing in federal court for South Carolina death row inmate Troy
Anthony Davis, a man slated to die after being convicted for the murder
of an off-duty Savannah police officer, Scalia wrote, “This court has
never held that the constitution forbids the execution of a convicted
defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to
convince a habeas court that he is `actually’ innocent.”

By Dave Lindorff

If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they
were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had
lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from
9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed
secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a
state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the
majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of
Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; it lied about what it was up to.

By Dave Lindorff

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy
for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,”
and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a
weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of
the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all,
it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is
actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies
that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list
like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for
the executives involved.

By Dave Lindorff

Back in 1965, as a 15-year-old kid, I had a chance to spend half a
year as a student at a boy’s gymnasium (high school) in Darmstadt, the
cultural capital of the German state of Hesse, which had the
distinction of having been one of a handful of cities in Germany
(Dresden was another) that were selected by the Allies to test out the
terror tactic of firebombing. The town was chosen for incendiary
bombardment precisely because it had no military value and thus, no air
defenses (and because it consisted mostly of wooden structures). With
Germany still wreaking horrific damage on the Allied bomber fleet, this
made it an inviting target.

By Dave Lindorff

The dithering and ducking going on in the Obama White House and the
Holder Justice Department over the crimes of the Bush administration
are taking on a comic aspect.

On the one hand, we have President Obama assuring us that under his
administration, there will be respect for the rule of law, and on the
other hand we have this one-time constitutional law professor and his
attorney general declaiming that there is no need for the appointment
of a prosecutor to bring charges against the people in the last
administration, in the CIA, in the National Security Agency and in the
Defense Department and the military who clearly have broken the law in
serious and felonious ways.

What gets silly is that America is either a nation of laws…or it
isn’t. It is either a place where “nobody is above the law”…or it isn’t.

There is really no middle ground here.

By Dave Lindorff

Amid the news that retail sales have fallen for the fourth straight
month, that housing prices continue to slump, and that another 600,000
workers were laid off in the month of January—the largest number in one
month since 1974—comes word from some experts in the business community that things are not going to be getting better soon, and that when they
do, they will not get back to the way things were in 2006 or early
2007, before the recession began.

In an interview I did for the trade publication Investment Management Weekly
on Thursday, Putnam Investments’ global asset allocation head Jeffrey
Knight said that while the stimulus could “help to prevent a Great
Depression sequel,” at the same time “Those who measure prosperity
against the Faustian opulence of the last 10 years may find that
stability, equilibrium and even recovery will still feel like a deep
depression.”

By Dave Lindorff

If an article by Gareth Porter in run by InterPress
is correct that CentCom Commander Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq
Commander Gen. Ray Odierno, backed by a group of lower-ranking
generals, are planning to mount a public campaign to try and undermine
President Obama’s plan for a withdrawal from Iraq in 16 months, Obama
needs to act fast and nip this dangerous act of insubordination in the
bud.

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama and his economic team are being careful to
couch all their talk about economic stimulus programs and bank bailout
programs in warnings that the economic downturn is serious and that it
will take considerable time to bounce back.

By Dave Lindorff

American foreign policy is moving from the absurd to the ludicrous.

Back in 2002, President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
managed to snooker the people of the United States, or at least a large
number of us, into believing that Iraq, a pathetic Third World country
ruled by a corrupt tin-pot dictator, was a grave danger to America,
akin to Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1940. We learned how absurd that
claim was when two hundred thousand American troops backed by the
mightiest air force the world has ever seen, slammed into the country
in March, 2003, and the Iraqi military simply folded up, and the Saddam
regime along with it.