Military

Obama Must Toss the Bums Out of Treasury, End the Wars and Start Leading

dlindorff — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:13:46 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the
White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con
men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial
crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they
have been giving him since last January has left the country still
mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending
and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of
bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to
fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has
turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he was in China
off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus
investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time,
that America faces the possibility of a “double-dip” recession. That’s
fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was? Not
that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of
people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.

This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert Hoover
started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset of
the Great Depression in 1930.

Clearly the American government needs to do just the opposite of
worrying about deficits. The only growth the US economy has seen to
date has been the result of government funding—the cash-for-clunkers
program gave a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and the
$8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up home sales briefly.
We know this because when the clunkers program ended, auto sales
crashed, and when the deadline approached for the end to the new home
tax credit, home building plunged almost 11%. The hundreds of billions
of dollars poured into so-called “shovel-ready” state and local
projects like roads, schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as
a million jobs, but the economy lost many times that many jobs over the
same period.

The problem with these stimulus programs is that they are
inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs. If roughly one
million jobs were created through the stimulus spending of say $200
billion (assuming that the February $800-billion stimulus program, to
mollify Republicans, consisted of one-half tax cuts and only one-half
actual federal spending, and that this federal spending was spread
evenly over a two-year period, that’s $200,000 per job!

If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury and in his
Council of Economic Advisors, and instead asked your Labor Secretary to
initiate a wide-ranging $200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the
unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do everything from teach
in overcrowded urban schools to laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from
cleaning up parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have given
jobs to close 8 million people—people who would have then spent their
money on goods and services and helped rally the economy from the
bottom up.

Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this point! The
country is up to the gills in debt without creating any jobs. (It’s
kind of like my mortgage. Why would I worry about using my credit card
to buy food for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage has me
deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama’s financial advisors, on
the evidence, would tell me I should let my family go hungry, because I
need to worry about my total debt load.) If you’re worried about
deficits, Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is costing one million dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to
Afghanistan or Iraq. And you want to have at least 100,000 guys over
there. That’s $100 billion a year right there—enough to hire four
million unemployed Americans back here at home!

This president is well on the way to rescuing President Hoover from
history’s crap heap by one-upping him in the realm of economic
mismanagement. We already have Obamavilles springing up around the
country. We haven’t started calling them that, but Naming Day isn’t far
off.

At least Hoover didn’t mire the country in another war while the economy was collapsing around him.

President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His fans, and I
was one of those who was willing to give him a shot last November, are
mostly giving up on him. Activists are already turning on him. My union
friends are disgusted. My African-American friends just shake their
heads in dismay. Liberal friends act embarrassed. A leftist friend,
retired, who devoted a month to campaigning for Obama full time in
Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost weekly to
Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe and others, blasting
Obama’s handling of the bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly
Obama cannot continue to appease Republicans and cater to Blue Dogs in
Congress and expect to be re-elected in 2012.

Indeed, if he doesn’t toss the crooks and charlatans in the Fed,
the Treasury and his Council of Economic Advisers out, and doesn’t stop
listening to the self-serving crazies in the military, he won’t even
have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of next year.

President Obama, aren’t you tired of being an embarrassment to your
friends and family? Aren’t you tired of being mocked by your foes?

Come on. We’re sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be a
leader.finally and kick some butt. Do something unconventional and
daring. End the wars, bring the troops home, announce a huge jobs
program, issue an executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise
taxes on the wealthy to back where they were in the 1960s, and let’s
get the country moving forward again.
__________________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama's War and Remembrance Day

dlindorff — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:12:43 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace
Prize President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop
level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we are about to have perhaps the
ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American
war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western
world as Armistice Day.

While modern Americans might not know it, with all the boom and
bombast and mindless flag-waving featured in the military parades
popular in today’s warrior culture, November 11 was originally
established by Congress back in 1919, a year after the day the guns of
World War I finally went silent over the blood-drenched fields of
Europe in what was once, in a naïve spasm of optimism, referred to as
the War to End All Wars. In declaring the national holiday Armistice
Day, Congress said it was to be “a day dedicated to the cause of world
peace.”

It’s hard to see how President Obama, who has yet to actually
receive his Nobel Prize as a peacemaker from Norway’s King Harald, is
contributing to peace with the addition of another 34,000 US soldiers
and Marines to the 68,000 already fighting, killing and dying on Afghan
soil. Maybe he thinks holding this escalation to 34,000 instead of
accommodating Afghanistan Theater Commander Gen. Stanley McCrystal’s
request for 80,000 more troops is an act of pacificistic moderation.

I doubt it. (Incidentally, some Pentagon and White House flaks are
referring to this escalation as another “surge,” but you can’t call a
50% increase in troop commitments a “surge.” It is what it is—a massive
expansion of the current war effort.)

No, sadly, Obama, who has declared the bloody assault on one of the
world’s most remote and impoverished lands to be a “necessary war,”
seems stubbornly and ignorantly and foolishly to be trying to emulate
the mistakes of an earlier Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson,
who turned a minor conflict in Vietnam into the biggest war, and
biggest disaster, that the US has engaged in since World War II.

Of course, the difference between the two men, Johnson and Obama,
is still enormous. While Obama may be just as bone-headed as was
Johnson in caving to the will of his generals instead of leading them,
he doesn’t hold a candle to Johnson when it comes to leading the charge
for progressive domestic legislation. While Johnson was ginning up the
war in Vietnam, he was simultaneously dragging the racist Democrats of
the southern states kicking and screaming into the post-slavery world
with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which for the first time
enabled African Americans to actually participate in voting. He also
rammed through Congress a truly innovative single-payer health
program—Medicare--to provide health care for all Americans once they
reached 65, or became disabled, as well as a second
program--Medicaid--to care for the poor.

Against these great accomplishments, Obama hasn’t even shown the
resolve to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the
military—something he could do with a phone call to the Joint Chiefs!
That is to say, while he’s willing to pointlessly, on the basis of some
bizarre political calculus, put another 34,000 young Americans in
harm’s way in Afghanistan, he’s not willing to ban discrimination
against those of them who may not be suitably heterosexual.

The signs are grimly clear that this silver-tongued but politically
gutless president is steering the country into yet another military
disaster—one that has killed 200 young men and women under his command,
but which could easily become as costly in blood and fortune as was
Johnson’s Vietnam War four decades ago. Making matters worse is the
fact that while the Vietnam War was fought at a time when America was
at its height as an economic power, today this country is an economic
basket case.

I predict that it will not be long before protesters will be
packing the Washington Mall and jamming the streets surrounding the
White House shouting chants of “Hey, Obama, What Do You Say? How Many
Kids Have You Killed Today?”(How’s he going to explain those shouts to
his daughters, Sasha and Malia?)

The sheen has already warn off this latest huckster for American
militarism and imperial adventure, and, with his increasingly
blood-stained hands tied by the Pentagon and military quagmire, he has
nothing to show domestically to earn him public support and affection.
The man had a chance, nine months ago, to come into office and smash
the criminal banking syndicate, to put Americans back to work with a
serious jobs program, and to finally expand Medicare to all, bringing
America into the modern world on health care. Instead he turned the
financial system completely over to the banksters, helping them to grow
even bigger, left the unemployed to fend for themselves, and fobbed off
the job of health care “reform” on Congress, which predictably did the
bidding of the Medical Establishment, and deep-sixed the whole thing.

It is, I would suggest, time for progressives to start searching
for a serious, gutsy, plain-speaking candidate to challenge Obama for
the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2012. This man needs
to have a new Gene McCarthy or George McGovern breathing down his neck
for the next three years.

Armistice Day would be a good day to launch that search.

______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment,” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). He can
be reached at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Country Joe, Kenny Rogers and Obama

dlindorff — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:26:02 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald
said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two,
three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In
fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that
started out because the US didn't want the Commies to win a battle in
the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of
the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been
struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become
the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious--we had no
business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

Afghanistan is the same thing all over again. We "got in"
surreptitiously for the same reason. Russia had helped organize a coup
to take over what passed for a "central government" and had found
itself mired in a brutal war of occuptation, and the US had begun, back
in the '70s, organizing and providing arms to the forces fighting the
Russians, not because Afghanistan--a country even more remote and
meaningless in terms of US interests or security than Vietnam--had any
importance but because it was a way to "stick it to" the Russians in
the waning days of the Cold War. But things have a way of coming back
to bite you, and the folks we armed turned out not to like us very much
either. So when we helped set up the foreign fighters--mostly Arab
volunteers--in Afghanistan, we set up a force of people who saw us, in
their home countries, as the oppressor and backer of vile and corrupt
regimes back home. It was only a matter of time before they began
turning their attentions to us. When 9-11 happened, we went after these
people in Afghanistan, and the government of the Taliban, which we had
formerly helped to power. In short order, what we managed to do was
substitute ourselves for the Russians.

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don't ask me. I don't give
a damn. And neither do most Americans. For a while, Afghanistan was the
"good war" in many Americans' minds, because they bought the lie that
conquering Afghanistan was necessary to defend the US from terrorism.
Of course that was silly. Terrorists don't need countries. They are as
mobile as a nuclear submarine or a flu virus. But once you put large
numbers of troops in a foreign country and have them storming around
shooting up the place, and once you start bombing the crap out of
villages and killing people indiscriminately, you create a new
situation where you become the occupier. So here we are, fighting
another war that makes no sense, has no purpose, and has no end. Good
war? Necessary war? What a joke!

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don't ask us. We don't
give a damn. And yet President Obama is now on track to add more
troops--maybe 20,000, maybe 40,000. Hell his general on the ground,
Gen. Stanley McCrystal, is asking for as much as 80,000, which would
put the total up to what it is in Iraq, where we're still bogged down
in an occupation quagmire.

That's where Kenny Rogers song "The Gambler" comes in. "You've got
to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk
away, know when to run."

We had a chance to walk away from Afghanistan back in 2001. The Al
Qaeda forces had been routed, the Taliban government had collapsed, and
people in much of the country of Afghanistan, who had been largely
spared any violence during the American attacks, were largely grateful
at having the yoke of fundamentalism lifted off their backs. But the US
didn't leave. A low-level war continued. More and more innocent people
were killed, or arrested and stuffed into a concentration camp and
torture hell-hole at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul, or shipped off to
the other hell-holes in Guantanamo Bay or other CIA secret sites. And
the Taliban were able to regroup and reposition themselves as saviors
of the nation. Now the US is cast as the occupier. We can't just "walk
away" anymore. We have to "fold 'em" and "run."

Will Obama have the sense of a gambler with a bad hand? So far the
signs are not good that he will. We are now in the position of having
70,000 US troops, soon to be closer to 100,000 troops, fighting,
killing and dying in a country run by a corrupt, vote-stealing leader
whose brother has long been known to be a leading profiteer in the
global opium/heroin trade, in which Afghanistan has become the world
leader (80-90 percent of the market) and, according to the New York Times,
for eight years and counting a paid CIA asset in charge of a
nation-wide death squad that is working on contract for The Agency.
Polls show that most Afghanis, understandably, want the US out of their
country. Wouldn't you?

A hand doesn't get much worse than that.

It's time to fold and run.

If we don't get the hell out of Afghanistan, then we'll all be
singing Country Joe's song, but with modified lyrics (which I just
premiered at a solo performance at a fund-raising dinner last week in
Philadelphia for the local chapter of Veterans for Peace):

Come on all you young women and men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself into a terrible jam,
Way off yonder in Afghanistan.
You ain't got a job, so pick up a gun!
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun!

All you folks in the National Guard,
You won't be protecting your back yard.
We may have floods and hurricanes here,
But you'll be dodging bullets in the desert there.
But if that's not what you signed up for,
We'll send you there a few times more!

General McCrystal, jump right in!
Your big chance has come again.
The VC whupped us back in '74,
But now you can show some Muslims what-for,
And maybe even earn you a medal or three,
Sittin' at your desk in DC.

Chorus:
Oh it's one, two, three what are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn.
Next stop's Afghanistan.
And it's five, six, seven, open up the Pearly Gates.
Ain't no time to wonder why.
Whoopee! We're all bound to die!

Come on mothers, here's the plan,
Send your son off to Afghanistan.
Come on fathers, it's all cool,
Send a daughter off to Ka-Bool.
And if they die, they come home free,
And nobody has to see.

chorus

Okay Wall Street, here's the deal:
Middle East oil is yours to steal.
Afghani blood, American too, is being shed now
Just for you!
And you can charge whatever you dare,
Cuz Washington don't care.

chorus

Bush and Obama, you've done your best,
You've made the Middle East into one sweet mess!
But that's okay, there's still a plan:
To divert attention just bomb Iran!
And if that seems a bit unwise,
Well hell, you've got the Nobel Prize!

Chorus:
And it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop's...
Pakistan?

_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and folksinger.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Pentagon Dirty Bombers: Depleted Uranium in the USA

dlindorff — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:27:12 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Nuclear Regulator Commission will be holding hearings tomorrow
and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the US Army for a permit
to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch
of flat land in what’s called the “saddle” between the sacred mountains
of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, and at the Schofield
Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is
a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing
of M101 mortar “spotting rounds,” that each contained close to half a
pound of depleted uranium (DU). The Army, which originally denied that
any DU weapons had been used at either location, now says that as many
as 2000 rounds of M101 DU mortars might have been fired at Pohakuloa
alone.

But that’s only a small part of the story.

The Army is actually seeking a master permit from the NRC to cover
all the sites where it has fired DU weapons, including penetrator
shells that, unlike the M101, are designed to hit targets and burn on
impact, turning the DU in the warhead into a fine dust of uranium oxide.

Depleted-uranium tipped M101 "spotting round" for Davy Crockett mortar

Uranium particles, whether pure uranium or in an oxidized form, are
alpha emitters, and can be highly carcinogenic and mutagenic if
ingested or inhaled, since they can lodge in one part of the body—the
kidney or lung or gonad, for example—and then irradiate surrounding
cells with large, destructive alpha particles (actually helium atoms),
until some gene is compromised and a cell become malignant.

Among the sites identified by the NRC as being contaminated with DU are:

Ft. Hood, TX
Ft. Benning, GA
Ft. Campbell, KY
Ft. Knox, KY
Ft. Lewis, WA
Ft. Riley, KS
Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD
Ft. Dix, NJ
Makua Military Reservation, HI

Other locations identified as having DU weapons contamination are:

China Lake Air Warfare Center, CA
Eglin AFB, Florida,
Nellis AFB, NV
Davis-Monthan AFB
Kirkland AFB, NM
White Sands Missile Range, NM
Ethan Allen Firing Range, VT
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

An application for a 99-year permit to test DU weapons at the NM
Inst. Of Mining and Technology claimed that that site’s test area was
“so contaminated with DU…as to preclude any other use”!

DU weapons have also been used by the Navy at Vieques Island off Puerto Rico (the Navy claimed it was a “mistake.”

The Pentagon continues a long history of claiming that DU is not
dangerous, although this official stance is belied by the warnings it
has given to its troops (though not to civilians in battle zones), to
stay well clear of tanks and other equipment destroyed by US tanks,
which used DU weapons as the ordnance of choice in both the Gulf War
and the current Iraq War. During both wars, DU ammunition was used by
Army and Marine tanks, by the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the A-10 ground
support jet, the Marine Harrier jet, and specially equipped F16 fighter
jets. The Navy also switched from DU ammunition to tungsten ammunition
in its Phalanx anti-missile ship defense system because of health and
environmental concerns with the DU ammo.

The Pentagon denies that it uses depleted uranium in bombs, missiles
and cruise missile warheads, but military personnel have reported their
use in all three delivery systems, and reports exist of DU
bunker-buster bombs, DU-tipped penetrator warheads on Tomahawk cruise
missiles and on some air-to-ground missiles.

It’s a good bet that all US munitions containing DU have been widely tested at various US military bases and testing grounds.

The bottom line is that at the same time that US government is
continuing to warn about the danger of terrorists acquiring the
materials to make a “dirty” bomb that could spread radioactive material
in the US, the US military has for years been doing exactly that, and
continues to do so, with no intention to clean up its messes, many of
which are allowing depleted uranium to percolate into ground water or
flow down streams to more populated areas.

Of course, it could have been worse. The M101 mortar that litters
Pohakuloa was actually designed as a range-finder for the Davy Crocket
mortar, which back in the late 1950s and the 1960s was designed to
allow infantry troops to fire a small “tactical” nuclear mortar shell
at targets just five miles distant. Some 700 of these “little nukes”,
that had a power of “just” several kilotons or less, were made and
actually made their way into the arsenals of troops in Europe and
elsewhere during the Cold War. Fortunately there are no reports of any
of them having been fired off at any of the military’s firing ranges.

Then again, the Pentagon doesn’t exactly have a sterling record
about telling the truth where nuclear weapons and DU weapons are
concerned.

Nor is the NRC to be relied on to protect the American public. As an
administrative judge wrote in a ruling on a case involving DU
contamination at Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana, the NRC exhibited
a “more than casual attitude with regard to decommissioning of sites on
which radioactive materials remain as a potential threat to public
health and safety and to the environment.”

In another case, involving cleanup of the ShieldAlloy Metallurgical
Corp.’s site in Newfield, NJ, where DU weapons were made, a judge said,
“at the very least, the (NRC) staff has countenanced…a situation that
will leave the citizens in the area surrounding the activity site in
doubt for close to two decades regarding what measures will ultimately
be taken for their protection.”
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Outrageous Thought of the Day: Nuclear Hypocrisy

dlindorff — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:47:22 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand
pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store
nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or
thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could
cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other
hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most
dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and
putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned
all across the landscape?

And I should note that it's not just remote places like Iraq and
Kuwait and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and
radioactive uranium dust--and I'm not just talking about the stuff that
gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff
that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough
as that is.

The truth is that depleted uranium weapons are being exploded and
burned right here in the USA in training operations. The center of
Hawaii's Big Island, for example, which is a military zone, is heavily
contaminated by DU ammunition fired by tanks there. The same is true of
Vieques Island, long a favored target for the Navy, which for years has
fired DU shells from its ships at the populated island, and also
launched DU-tipped missiles and dropped DU-loaded "bunker-buster" bombs
at it.

While I don't have direct knowledge, I'd say it's a safe bet that
there are a number of sites on the Mainland US where DU munitions have
also been widely used--maybe White Sands Proving Ground the Marine
training area near Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern
California, or other such training and testing areas.

The simple truth is that our own government, besides committing an
ongoing atrocity in the Middle East, is also poisoning our own country
with uranium oxide.

Our Nobel Peace Prize president should take note. President John F.
Kennedy reportedly moved to halt open air testing of nuclear weapons
after looking at the rain falling outside the window of the Oval Office
and asking a science advisor whether it was delivering nuclear fallout
to his front lawn (he was told that it was). Maybe President Obama
should consider that the rain today is delivering uranium dust to his
wife's and daughters' garden in the back yard of the White House. At
least he should take a look at pictures of the horribly deformed babies
being born to mothers in Iraq (and of the lucky babies that are
stillborn), thanks to the radioactive warfare that the US military has
been employing against both that country and Afghanistan--his
"necessary" war.

There is another irony here too. The US is expressing concern about
Iran enriching uranium, and possibly creating a nuclear bomb, which in
the unlikely event that it were ever used, might spread some
radioactivity around parts of the Middle east, yet it is the US which
already has spread 2000 or more tons of uranium dust all over Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 18 years--far more than any small Iranian bomb could release.

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is
"The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Depleted Uranium Weapons: The Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan Are No Joke

dlindorff — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:08:18 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15,
could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted
uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300
tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban,
populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan
War.

Depleted uranium, despite its rather benign-sounding name, is not
depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term “depleted” refers only
to its being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission reactions
in nuclear reactors. The nuclear waste material from nuclear power
plants, DU as it is known, is what is removed from the power plants’
spent fuel rods and is essentially composed of the uranium isotope
U-238 as well as U-236 (a product of nuclear reactor fission, not found
in nature), as well as other trace radioactive elements. Once simply a
nuisance for the industry, that still has no permanent way to dispose
of the dangerous stuff, it turns out to be an ideal metal for a number
of weapons uses, and has been capitalized on by the Pentagon. 1.7 times
heavier than lead, and much harder than steel, and with the added
property of burning at a super-hot temperature, DU has proven to be an
ideal penetrator for warheads that need to pierce thick armor or dense
concrete bunkers made of reinforced concrete and steel. Once through
the defenses, it burns at a temperature that incinerates anyone inside
(which is why we see the carbonized bodies of bodies in the wreckage of
Iraqi tanks hit by US fire). Accordingly it has found its way into 30
mm machine gun ammunition, especially that used by the A-10 Warthog
ground-attack fighter planes used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan
(as well as Kosovo). It is also the warhead of choice for Abrams tanks
and is also reportedly used in GBU-28 and the later GBU-37 bunker
buster bombs, each of which can have 1-2 tons of the stuff in its
warhead. DU is also used as ballast in cruise missiles, and this burns
up when a missile detonates its conventional explosive. Some cruise
missiles are also designed to hit hardened targets and reportedly
feature DU warheads, as does the AGM-130 air-to-ground missile, which
carries a one-ton penetrating warhead. In addition, depleted uranium is
used in large quantities in the armor of tanks and other equipment.
This material becomes a toxic source of CU pollution when these
vehicles are attacked and burned.

While the Pentagon has continued to claim, against all scientific
evidence, that there is no hazard posed by depleted uranium, US troops
in Iraq have reportedly been instructed to avoid any sites where these
weapons have been used—destroyed Iraqi tanks, exploded bunkers,
etc.—and to wear masks if they do have to approach. Many torched
vehicles have been brought back to the US, where they have been buried
in special sites reserved for dangerously contaminated nuclear
materials. (Thousands of tons of DU-contaminated sand from Kuwait,
polluted with DU during the US destruction of Iraq’s tank forces in the
1991 war, were removed and shipped to a waste site in Idaho last year
with little fanfare.) Suspiciously, international health officials have
been prevented or obstructed from doing medical studies of DU sites in
Iraq and Afghanistan. But an excellent series of articles several years
ago by the Christian Science Monitor
described how reporters from that newspaper had visited such sites in
Iraq with Geiger-counters and had found them to be extremely “hot” with
radioactivity.

The big danger with DU is not as a pure metal, but after it has
exploded and burned, when the particles of uranium oxide, which are
just as radioactive as the pure isotopes, can be inhaled or ingested.
Even the smallest particle of uranium in the body is both deadly
poisonous as a chemical, and over time can cause cancer—particularly in
the lungs, but also the kidneys, testes and ovaries.

There are reports of a dramatic increase in the incidence of
deformed babies being born in the city of Fallujah, where DU weapons
were in wide use during the November 2004 assault on that city by US
Marines. The British TV station SKY UK, in a report last month that has
received no mention in any mainstream American news organization, found
a marked increase in birth defects at local hospitals. Birth defects
have also been high for years in the Basra area in the south of Iraq,
where DU was used not just during America’s 2003 “shock and awe” attack
on Iraq, but also in the 1991 Gulf War.

Further, a report sent to the UN General Assembly by Dr Nawal
Majeed Al-Sammarai, Iraq’s Minister of Women’s Affairs since 2006,
stated that in September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 babies
born, 24% of which died within their first week of life. Worse yet,
fully 75% of the babies born that month were deformed. This compares to
August 2002, six months before the US invasion, when 530 live births
were reported with only six dying in the first week, and only one
deformity. Clearly something terrible is happening in Fallujah, and
many doctors suspect it’s the depleted uranium dust that is permeating
the city.

But the real impact of the first heavy use of depleted uranium
weaponry in populous urban environments (DU was used widely especially
in 2003 in Baghdad, Samara, Mosul and other big Iraqi cities), will
come over the years, as the toxic legacy of this latest American war
crime begins to show up in rising numbers of cancers, birth defects and
other genetic disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, as in the case of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the toxic
effects of this latest battlefield use of toxic materials by the US
military will also be felt for years to come by the men and women who
were sent over to fight America’s latest wars. As with Agent Orange,
the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department have been assiduously
denying the problem, and have been just as assiduously denying claims
by veterans of the Gulf War and the two current wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan who claim their cancers and other diseases have anything to
do with their exposure to DU.

The record on Agent Orange should lead us to be suspicious of the government’s claims.

The deformed and dead babies in Iraq should make us demand a
cleanup of Iraq and Afghanistan, medical aid for the victims, and a ban
on all depleted uranium weapons.
________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
work is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

dlindorff — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:51:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined
“Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to
be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly
dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was
acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13
ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also
responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart
disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA
will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by
exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle
by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to
acknowledge the American government’s responsibility for poisoning them
and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and
grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to
man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune
illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the
general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its
battlefield use of toxins—most significantly the increasingly common
use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets—an
approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops
and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to
eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by military
affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the
obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry
saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent
Orange in Vietnam—the people on whose heads and lands the toxic
chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US
government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.

Thai Thi Nga, 16, 2nd-generation victim of US Agent Orange use in Vietnam

According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as
many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related
illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of
Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge
who ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” there are at least
three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are
suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans
and their children. It is estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese
in the country’s south currently suffer from chronic health problems
due to Agent Orange exposure, either to themselves, or to a parent or
grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom are retarded, and
others of whom cannot walk or have no use of their arms, need constant
care.

Veterans for Peace,
an organization whose membership includes a large number of Vietnam War
veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide funds for health
care, education, vocational education, chronic care, home care and
equipment to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam—a call which
Congress and the White House have consistently ignored. Tests have
found dioxin levels around the sites of the three main former US bases
in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 times recognized safe levels.
The US dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those bases
to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese fighters could use to approach
the bases, but it was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.

One organization that includes a number of American veterans of the
way, including former military doctors or soldiers who later became
physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.

It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given America’s use of two
nuclear weapons against civilian targets in Japan a few years later,
but back in World War II, in the midst of the most brutal
island-to-island fighting during the Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate
General in the Pentagon ruled that a military request for permission to
use herbicides against the Japanese on Pacific islands would be illegal
under the Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now called the
Geneva Conventions). He ruled that trying to destroy the crops of
civilians on those islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would be
a war crime. The US went ahead and used the herbicides anyway, arguing
that even though it was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since the
Japanese had already broken the laws of war by using strychnine to kill
military guard dogs in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side
breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.

But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used toxic materials
against US forces or against South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon
in the Vietnam War never even considered whether spraying a highly
toxic herbicide over 1.4 million hectares—12% of the total land area of
Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of the country—might be a
war crime.

Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its massive
defoliation campaign, about studies showing that Agent Orange was
heavily laced with deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some by
the chemical’s makers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and never even warned
the troops who handled the material daily, or who were sent out to
fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.

The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by America’s
criminal use of Agent Orange to defoliate a nation would be a good
place for President Obama to start earning his just-awarded Nobel Peace
Prize. He could kick off his peace campaign by finally honoring
President Richard Nixon’s immediately broken promise to provide several
billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Vietnam at the conclusion of
peace talks at the end of the war. Not a dollar of such aid was ever
given.

Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times could salvage a bit
of its journalistic reputation by having Dao or some other reporter
write a piece about the impact of America’s Agent Orange use on the
people of Vietnam.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

WTF? Obama Gets the Nobel Peace Prize?

dlindorff — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:13:53 -0400

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.

The Nobel Committee claimed that during Obama’s short period as president, the US “is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

Well, certainly when compared to the prior presidency of George W. Bush, that statement is correct, but that’s not saying much. After all, under President Obama, Guantanamo’s terrorist prison is still in operation and is holding people whom even the government admits are guilty of nothing. Under President Obama, the US has also blocked the Goldstone Report which condemns Israel of war crimes in its recent assault on Gaza. And under Obama, the US military in Afghanistan has continued to slaughter disproportionate numbers of civilians through its wanton use of aerial bombardment, pilotless Predator drones, and antipersonnel weaponry.

President Obama may have, as the Nobel Committee states, put forward a vision of nuclear disarmament, but his administration at the same time continues to refuse to sign the international anti-landmine treaty (putting America in the wretched company of just Russia, India and China). And under Obama, the US continues its role as not only the leading producer and exporter of arms, but also as the major initiator of wars in the world. Under Obama the US continues to outspend the rest of the world’s nations combined on its military. And don’t forget, Obama, like President Bush before him, continues to threaten to attack Iran, over that nation’s alleged nuclear weapons program—a program the very existence of which remains highly debatable.

As for climate change policy, President Obama in practice has taken a largely hands-off approach to getting Congress to act, not using his considerable political clout to force action on climate change legislation. It is now conceded that the US will go to the international climate conference in December with no bill passed to limit or reduce the nation’s CO2 emissions. Nor is the Obama administration likely to push for any significant program of CO2 reductions in the future.

Nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize closed on Feb. 1, less than two weeks after Obama took the oath of office as President, but the Nobel Committee in Norway had a good nine months since then to observe this president’s actions—and his lack of actions—on the key issues weighing on the decision. In the end, committee members were bamboozled by this president’s rhetoric of hope just as were the American people during the election campaign. As the committee wrote in announcing its decision: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future."

If Nobel Peace prizes are being awarded to people who are simply giving the world hope, surely the judges could have found any number of worthy speechifiers. Hell, even the dictatorial leaders of China and North Korea can make flowery speeches about peace and human dignity. More to the point, the committee had under consideration at least two far more deserving nominees for the award who were actually acting at great personal risk to further peace and human rights: Chinese freedom-fighter Hu Jia and Afghani women’s rights advocate Simi Samar. It is an insult to the memory of former award winners like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jody Williams, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and others who put their lives and careers on the line to struggle for peace and human dignity to give this award to a man who has accomplished so little, and who, in fact, in his short time in office, has managed to expand one war, to block the international condemnation of the brutality of another, and who has done nothing to reverse his own country’s leading role as a promoter of war and international violence.

Henry Kissinger hung his blood-drenched Nobel Peace Award on his office wall on Wall Street and continued to make obscene sums of money off human suffering in his dotage. One can only hope (ah, that intoxicating word!) that President Obama will take his award seriously, and will use his new status as official man of peace to halt America’s campaign of violence in Afghanistan, calling a regional peace conference to settle that conflict instead of simply expanding the war, that he will announce a major cut in American military spending and a halt to arms exports, that he will sign the landmine treaty and voluntarily end the production and use of antipersonnel weapons of all kinds, and that he will finally have the US join the International Criminal Court of Justice.

Right. Now that’s the audacity of hope.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

Criminalizing Dissent: Obama Pot Calls Iranian Kettle Black

dlindorff — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:41:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama, referring to the violent attacks on
protesters against the controversial election results in Iran’s
just-completed presidential election, this week lectured Iran’s
government, saying, “Peaceful dissent should never be subject to
violence.”

Referring to the tens and hundreds of thousands of frustrated and
angry Iranians who have taken to the streets accusing Iranian
authorities of rigging the election in favor of incumbent President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama said that “the Iranian people and their
voices should be heard and respected."

But there is a certain hypocrisy going on here.

Just days ago, the ACLU of Northern California issued a press release
announcing that it had filed a complaint over a Pentagon anti-terrorism
training manual. That training manual, aimed at Pentagon personnel,
describes domestic protests as “low-level terrorist activity.”

As Staff Attorney Ann Brick and ACLU Washington National Security
Policy Council member Michael German write in their complaint letter to
the Department of Defense, “For the DoD to instruct its employees that
lawful protest activities should be treated as ‘low-level terrorism’ is
deeply disturbing in and of itself. It is an even more egregious insult
to constitutional values, however, when viewed in the context of a
long-term pattern of domestic security initiatives that have attempted
to equate lawful dissent with terrorism.”

The ACLU has documented that the government has been and continues a
policy of spying on legitimate peaceful protest
organizations—particularly those that have been opposing America’s wars
and its military policies, and the new president has said nothing and
done nothing about terminating this egregious assault on First
Amendment freedom of speech and assembly. Given that President Obama
has also done nothing since taking office to undo the USA PATRIOT Act,
which codifies much activity that traditionally would have been called
dissent as a crime, or to publicly reverse the policy of the last eight
years during which non-violent protest organizations have been spied on
and infiltrated by agents of the military and by the FBI, and during
which actual protesters have been harassed, penned into fenced-off
“free speech zones,” assaulted by armed police and arrested, his
pontificating to Iran about the sanctity of dissent rings particularly
hollow.

Imagine, if you will, what this government’s response would be to
having hundreds of thousands of American protesters gather in the
center of Washington, DC without a permit, to protest the policies of
the national government. There would be riot police in the thousands,
some mounted on horseback. There would be federal troops. There would
be police charges against demonstrators. There would be tear gas and
arrests.

How do we know this? It happens every time there are major protests in Washington—even when protests are granted permits.

This writer spent three days in the Federal Detention Center at
Occoquan, VA, back in 1967 for participating in a peaceful anti-war
protest at the Pentagon that year. I was one of hundreds at that event
who found himself, as a peaceful demonstrator, confronting armed
federal troops with fixed bayonets at that event. Not much has changed
since ‘67, as others have met the same fate over the years in
Washington and around the country. Certainly there is every reason to
assume that, if the public finally loses patience over the current
administration’s continuation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its
failure to really tackle the health care crisis, and its limp response
to the economic crisis, and if people descend on Washington or perhaps
New York City en masse to protest, those people will be met with the
same kind of draconian, police-state style response that protesters
have met in the past--or that protesters are being met with in Iran
today.

If the Pentagon is teaching its people to equate protest with
“low-level terrorism,” how different, really, is Washington from Tehran?
______________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in signed collector’s edition through his website).
Lindorff’s work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net