LiarsWatch

In Praise of 'Joe' Wilson: What's Wrong with Calling Out Lies in Congress?

dlindorff — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:55:28 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Liberals are acting all righteous and offended that a member of the Republican opposition, Rep. “Joe” Wilson of South Carolina, would deign to besmirch the “dignity of the presidency” by calling out “Liar!” in the middle of President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening.

But what’s wrong with that? Whatever the veracity of Obama’s claim that his proposed health care “reform” would not pay for the health care of illegal immigrants residing in the US (and one can only hope that statement was fatuous, because at a minimum we would certainly want the government to pay for the care of an illegal immigrant in childbirth, or of an illegal immigrant who came down with a contagious disease), and even if Rep. Wilson is a racist bozo who wrongly thinks or wants to imply that Obama's plan would be out there enrolling undocumented workers in the millions at taxpayer expense, why shouldn’t members of Congress call out a president if they think he’s lying to them from the podium?

One of the big problems with American democracy is that the presidency has over the years been elevated to the level of a monarchy, with all the imperial trappings and pomposity formerly associated with royalty. Presidents surely should get no more respect than a prime minister, and look at the hoots and catcalls PMs have to endure when they address Parliament in the UK. That’s a good thing.

Anyhow, it would have been far better if, instead of clapping wildly, liberal Democrats in Congress had hooted down some of the other whoppers and stretchers told by the president in his health care address.

Among them:

1. First and foremost, Obama’s claim that he was “determined to be the last” president to have to deal with health care reform and that he didn’t want to “kick the can” down the street for a future administration to deal with. In fact, that is just what he did with his proposal, which has left the basic untenable system of employee-financed healthcare in place, and which has left the private insurance industry in control of who gets treatment and how much they will have to pay for it. It’s a sure bet that before very long—perhaps in just four more years—another president will face the same crisis. A boisterous cat-call of “Can Kicker!” here would have been in order.

2. Obama said that “nothing else even comes close” to health care expenditures in terms of causing the federal deficit. In fact, something does---the military budget—but that topic is off limits for both Republicans and Democrats. Why couldn’t Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold have yelled out, “What about military spending!”

3. Perhaps one of the biggest lies of the night was the president’s claim that while there are “arguments to be made” for single-payer systems like Canada’s, switching to single-payer in the US would require building “an entirely new system from scratch.” The truth: Medicare is already a successful single-payer system and in fact, it is bigger and older than Canada’s own nation-wide system. Expanding it to cover every American would not be starting from scratch at all. It would be expanding something already time-tested. Where were the shouts of “What about Medicare!” from Rep. John Conyers (and his dozens of cosponsors), whose bill, HR 676, to expand Medicare to all has been barred from getting even a hearing by the House leadership with encouragement from the White House?

4. The president insisted that insurance executives don’t “cherry-pick” profitable customers and push out those who are sickest, because they are “bad people.” He said they are just doing it because it’s profitable. It would have been nice if at least someone in the assembled throng of lobbiest-enthralled House and Senate members had shouted out something like “Just like bank robbers and drug dealers!” because the truth is that health insurance executives are bad people. They know that they are killing people every day through their ruthless policies, and they go right ahead and do it. Pursuit of profit does not, or at least should not, constitute a license to kill. (Just imagine a hit man, at his sentencing hearing, telling the judge, “I’m not a bad person, Your Honor. I just knock people off because it’s profitable.”)

5. The president said he was “not trying to put the insurance industry out of business,” and added, “They provide a legitimate service.” This line, not surprisingly, given the amount of money that industry has lavished on members of Congress and on the president himself, got what was probably the loudest bi-partisan applause of the night. But it surely led to a lot of groans and of coffee, tea or beer being spewed out involuntarily across carpets and upholstery in homes across America. Legitimate service? Insurance firms are nothing but vampires, or better, leeches on the health care system. They provide no service. Ask doctors, who have to fight to get permission to treat patients, and then fight to get reimbursed. Ask patients, who spend hours on the phone arguing with faceless drones, some probably in Bangalor or Manila, who are denying them coverage for needed medicines or procedures that are supposed to be covered. Listen to the testimony of whistle-blowers who have confirmed that those drones actually get paid bonuses based upon the number of claims they manage to deny. How satisfying it would have been if someone in Congress had yelled out, “Legitimate service my ass!”

6. Turning to the pathetically circumscribed and downsized “public option” in his “reform” plan, Obama declared that “a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option.” Well that may be true, but it's not the whole truth. It would have been a great moment for Kucinich or Conyers or some other progressive member of Congress to shout out: “A majority also favors a single-payer plan!”

7. And where the defenders of women’s rights, when Obama vowed that under his plan, “no federal funds would be used to fund abortions?” Couldn’t someone have shouted out, “Women have rights too!” Is the president really saying that if a woman is raped, or a child gets pregnant through incest, or if a woman’s life is at risk because of a pregnancy, that his public plan will not pay for her to obtain an abortion? Cries of “For shame!” should have been ringing through the hall!

8. Finally the president said that one reason the nation has such record deficits is that during the prior administration, so many initiatives, “including the Iraq War,” were set in motion but “not paid for,” and he vowed, “I will not make that same mistake with health care.” But he is doing the same thing with supplemental war funding requests for his war in Afghanistan, and with the continued war and occupation in Iraq, and someone should have called him on that. Besides, there’s no way that the program he is proposing will be paid for by current funding. It will add to the deficit and he should have the courage to admit it, or to call for more taxes on the wealthy to pay for it. A lusty “Tax the rich!” cry in unison from the progressive caucus would have been appreciated by viewers.

Whack-job or not, Rep. Wilson did the cause of democracy and honest discourse a favor when, faced with a statement he felt was clearly false, he found he couldn’t repress the urge to call the president a “liar.” In doing so, he put a much-needed ding in the wholly inappropriate and dangerous imperial aura of “respect” that has grown like lichens around the office of President. No more than anyone else in this nation, a president should have to earn the respect not just of the members of Congress, but of the broader public. He or she is another citizen, no more and no less, and when a president, like President Obama in this instance, dissembles, exaggerates or attempts to deceive or mislead, it is healthy for democracy if he is called out on it immediately and publicly.

We need more honesty in Washington, not more civility.
_________________

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

Video: David Swanson on War Powers

davidswanson — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:27:39 -0400

David Swanson discusses the power of war and chapter 2 of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" on September 3, 2009, in Charlottesville, VA.

Buy the book.

CIA’s Lies About Secret Program Should Have Congress In Open Revolt

dlindorff — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:04:06 -0400

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.

Now, given what we do know about the Bush/Cheney
administration—that it initiated a massive campaign of spying on
Americans by the Defense Department, the FBI, and the National Security
Agency, as well as other intelligence agencies, that it initiated a
campaign of torture of captives, including American citizens, while
asserting that the President didn’t even need to notify the courts or
the public about the arrest, detention, torture or even execution of an
American citizen if he, acting on his own, deemed that person to be an
“enemy combatant,” and given that we also know that Bush and Cheney
lied repeatedly about the justification for their invasion of Iraq, and
refused to be put under oath in their “interviews” by the 9-11
Commission, you would think the members of Congress, which was
railroaded into supporting everything from the USA PATRIOT Act to the
Iraq War invasion based on all these lies and deceptions, would be
demanding answers regarding this mysterious program.

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
_________________

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

What Bush Told Blair Could End the Wars

davidswanson — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:16:08 -0400

By David Swanson

In May 2005 we launched AfterDowningStreet.org to publicize the Downing Street Minutes. By June we'd had great, if fleeting, success. During the following months and years, mountains of new memos and statements emerged on the Iraq War lies, many of them more damaging than the Downing Street documents. But increasingly nobody cared, because evidence of crimes was less interesting once Congress had dropped the pretense that it might take action. The single most powerful, and yet largely ignored, document yet to emerge, might, now in 2009, finally, produce results. And, of course, it is our friends over in England who are, as always, two steps ahead of us.

This document, or rather, reports of it, emerged in February 2006. We labeled it the White House Memo and began promoting awareness of it. We did not get far with the US corporate media. This is the same document that Vincent Bugliosi refers to as "the Manning Memo" in his book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder". Bugliosi rightly makes it central to his case. Part of the conversation recorded in the memo is recreated in Crawford, Texas, rather than the White House, in Oliver Stone’s 2008 film “W.”

The memo was first mentioned in Philippe Sands' 2005 book "Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules." And it was Sands, an attorney from England, who publicized the memo in February 2006. Now the British media is questioning whether the British government's upcoming review of the Iraq War lies will include such damning pieces of evidence as the White House Memo. And Philippe Sands is advocating for its inclusion. Peace groups led by the Stop the War Coalition in England are planning a rally at Parliament on Wednesday to demand that the governmental inquiry be public. Secrecy, after all, is what allowed the war in the first place.

And what difference might it make if the public in the United Kingdom or (can you imagine it!) in the United States knew about this memo? Well, this is a document that goes beyond proving that Bush wanted war and lied about the reasons for it (That's so 2002). This document proves that Bush was willing to provoke Saddam Hussein into attacking Americans.

On January 31, 2003, prior to the full-scale invasion of Iraq in March, President George W. Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the White House. After their meeting, they spoke to the media (video) and claimed not to have decided on war, to be working hard to achieve peace, and to be worried about the imminent threat from Iraq to the American people. They claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to al Qaeda, and -- Bush implied, but avoided explicitly stating -- to the attacks of September 11, 2001. They also claimed to have UN authorization for launching an attack on Iraq. These were all blatant lies, as revealed in the White House Memo, which recorded what Bush and Blair had talked about behind closed doors just prior to the press conference. And yet, to my knowledge, not one of the reporters you see in the above video has made a peep about it.

Blair advisor David Manning took notes that day. The accuracy of his memo has never been challenged by Bush or Blair. According to Manning, Bush proposed to Blair a number of possible ways in which they might be able to create an excuse to launch a war against Iraq. One of Bush’s proposals was "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours [sic]. If Saddam fired on them," Bush argued, "he would be in breach" of UN resolutions. In other words, Bush wanted to falsely paint US planes with UN colors and try to get Iraq to shoot at them. This is what Bush really thought about the horrible, evil threat of Saddam Hussein: he wanted to provoke him. He wanted to get US pilots shot at in order to start a war that Congress would then fund for years, and perhaps decades, on the grounds that doing so would "support the troops."

Bush understood that the United Nations had not passed a resolution to legalize an attack on Iraq. The White House Memo describes Bush telling Blair that "the US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would 'twist arms' and 'even threaten'. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway." (These are Manning's notes of what Bush said.) In other words, going to the United Nations was not actually an attempt to avoid war, but an attempt to gain legal cover for a war that would be launched regardless of whether that project succeeded. And Bush wasn’t kidding about twisting arms; that very same day the National Security Agency (NSA) launched a plan to bug the phones and e-mails of UN Security Council members.

At this time, a month and a half before the full-on invasion of Iraq, the US military was already engaging in hugely escalated bombing runs over Iraq and redeploying troops, including to newly constructed bases in the Middle East, all in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, and all with money that had not been appropriated for these purposes. The reporters who questioned Bush and Blair on January 31, 2003, did not know about or ask about those activities.

That Bush was interested in provoking Iraq is confirmed by extensive covert operations called DB/Anabasis reported by Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their 2006 book "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War." These operations "envisioned staging a phony incident that could be used to start a war. A small group of Iraqi exiles would be flown into Iraq by helicopter to seize an isolated military base near the Saudi border. They then would take to the airwaves and announce a coup was under way. If Saddam responded by flying troops south, his aircraft would be shot down by US fighter planes patrolling the no-fly zones established by UN edict after the first Persian Gulf War. A clash of this sort could be used to initiate a full-scale war. On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed covert findings authorizing the various elements of Anabasis. The leaders of the congressional intelligence committees -- including Porter Goss, a Republican, and Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat -- were briefed."

A similar story came out about Dick Cheney with regard to Iran in 2008. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported at a journalism conference in 2008 that at a 2008 meeting in the Vice President’s office, soon after an incident in the Strait of Hormuz in which a US carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats, "There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build -- we in our shipyard -- build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy Seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can't have Americans killing Americans. That's the kind of -- that's the level of stuff we're talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected."

After the invasion of Iraq, with no weapons or ties to 9/11 having been found, Diane Sawyer asked Bush on camera (ABC News, December 16, 2003) about the claims he had made about "weapons of mass destruction," and he replied: "What’s the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, if he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger."

Iraqi deaths as a result of the invasion and occupation, measured above the high death rate under international sanctions preceding the attack, are estimated at 1.2 to 1.3 million by two independent sources (Just Foreign Policy’s updated figure based on the Johns Hopkins / Lancet report, and the British polling company Opinion Research Business’s estimate as of August 2007). According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the number of Iraqis who have fled their homes has reached 4.7 million. If these estimates are accurate, a total of nearly 6 million human beings have been displaced from their homes or killed, as of August 2008. Many times that many have certainly been injured, traumatized, impoverished, and deprived of clean water and other basic needs.

That we can't prosecute torture is bad enough. That you have to cross an ocean to even find a discussion of accountability for war lies is worse.

Funding War Is Good for Babies and Your Garden

davidswanson — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:13:46 -0400

By David Swanson The executive director of something called the National Security Network, named Heather Hurlburt, offers -- I kid you not, and that's really her name, so try not to hurl -- Six Reasons to Love the Supplemental and Celebrate Progressives in Government. Hurlburt begins with her own warning not to vomit:

"Usually, there are lots of reasons for progressives not to love supplemental spending bills. And I won't argue that this one is perfect. But before you get too queasy, consider six ways that progressives in Congress and the man at 1600 Pennsylvania turned 'more of the same' into 'change.'"

Oh thank goodness! What a relief! For a minute there I thought we might have to consider breaking out some… well, frankly, some mild criticism of the new emperor. I know, I know, it's not appropriate. But I was thinking, you know, another $97 billion off budget for wars, more dead bodies, more displaced families, more people who hate America, more debt for our grandkids, plus $108 billion for European banksters stapled onto the same bill. I mean, I was almost ready to suggest possibly, I don't know, phoning the White House to ask for the best talking points on this one. But Heather has saved us. THANK YOU, Heather! I suppose we should at least read the six reasons after Hurlburt finishes her prefatory remarks:

"Perhaps most important, the bill offers shifts in momentum that progressives can build on -- prioritizing economic support for poorer countries, even in an economic downturn; stopping the advance of the conservative effort to turn back the closing of Gitmo and ending of torture; and ending the apparently ceaseless expansion of defense budgets. It also marks various brands and blocs of progressives coming together to promote each other's goals -- i.e., successfully managing American's security and international engagement. And that's worth showing a little love."

Jackpot! That's six bonus reasons before we even get to the six reasons. We're home free! Wake me when it's primary season. Except, I'm wondering why the word "war" hasn't come up yet, and I'm not actually totally sure of that very first reason, once I've put my beer down:

"shifts in momentum that progressives can build on"

What IS that, exactly? Maybe I need MORE beer. Or maybe the other reasons clear it up. Let's see.

"prioritizing economic support for poorer countries, even in an economic downturn"

Now, I'll admit this SOUNDS good. But isn't Afghanistan the third poorest country on earth, a place where people fight because it's the only available career move? And doesn't this bill prioritize bombing those people's houses with unmanned drones? And doesn't that make everything worse in every possible way? I mean, am I supposed to believe Heather Hurlburt or my own eyes? Now, the bill does contain funding for the financial overclass in European countries, but aren't European countries, even in the east, richer than Afghanistan or Iraq, the places we're focused on bombing and shooting? And doesn't the IMF have a tremendous record of leaving nations around the world worse off than it found them? If we wanted to provide aid to poor countries couldn't we simply stop bombing and occupying them and instead, you know, provide aid?

"stopping the advance of the conservative effort to turn back the closing of Gitmo and ending of torture"

You know, these look like two more reasons to vote for war funding that have nothing to do with war funding. If the war funding is not a good thing, and all these other proposals are, why not just do them without the war funding? The thinking cannot possibly be that all this other stuff does more good than the war funding does harm. Can it? Hurlburt never makes that claim. But then, surely she can't just be picking out the smaller supposedly good reasons to vote for something she knows stinks to high heaven. Can she? In any event, this bill does NOT close Guantanamo. Nor does it do anything to end torture. In fact, it funds the expansion of massive military bases where hundreds, if not thousands, of people are imprisoned by our nation completely outside the rule of law, virtually guaranteeing that torture will continue, as reports - keep - telling - us - it is.

"ending the apparently ceaseless expansion of defense budgets"

If you're like me, this was where you really tossed your tamales. Think about this. At the request of President Obama, the 111th Congress just recently passed the largest military budget in the history of the known universe. It had virtually nothing to do with "defense." And now an "emergency supplemental" based on no emergency whatsoever is supposed to be added on top like icing. This is $85 billion that Obama wants for wars that have been dragging on for the better part of a decade, plus $12 billion Congress wants to generously pile on for things like airplanes the Pentagon has no use for. And yet, by passing this disgusting swill and shoveling it onto Obama's desk for his signature, Heather Hurlburt tells us we are ending the expansion of "defense" budgets. And you thought the age of miracles had ended long ago!

"marks various brands and blocs of progressives coming together to promote each other's goals -- i.e., successfully managing American's security and international engagement"

That would be truly wonderful, Heather, but -- I don't know how else to put this -- WHAT the Cheney are you TALKING about?! Is the peace movement promoting someone else's goals? No, because the peace movement opposes this murderous, racist, and borderline genocidal legislation. Are any social justice groups promoting peace? That's rhetorical, of course. Or, by "brands and blocs of progressives" does Heather mean completely unprogressive things like the "National Security Network" and astroturfers compliantly maintaining their silence, like True Majority, Moveon.org, Open Left, TPM, Campaign for America's Future, and the Center for American Progress? All right. Settle your stomachs, and get ready for the Six Descending Circles of Hurlburt Hell:

1. It marks the first turn-back of conservative efforts to push the Obama Administration to the right on torture. Some progressives want to force the Administration to release photos of Abu Ghraib abuse -- others believe that allowing Senator Lieberman and Graham to set that policy legislatively takes away the Administration's freedom of action and sends the wrong message about what photos might be suppressed, and why. And they won!

Pushing the Obama Administration to the right on torture would require dressing the president in a black hood and sticking a whip in his hand. This administration has converted torture from a crime to a policy preference, guaranteeing its continuation, has openly instituted preventive detention and rendition, and has claimed unprecedented powers of secrecy in order to cover up torture secrets. Now, let's look at what happened, because it really was a progressive victory, but you'd never know it from Hurlburt. The "some progressives" who want to force "the Administration" to release photos are actually courts of law. The photos were ordered released. Many of us want the transparency we were told we were voting for. We want all of these photos released and more and videos and memos and all the rest, and this evidence is NOT just from Abu Ghraib. Many of us would be happy to have the photos turned over to a prosecutor, but we also believe the public should know what its government is doing and that the opposite belief is not progressive at all. From Hurlburt's twisted prose, you'd think Lieberman and Graham were trying to force the photos released. They are actually trying to defy the courts and prevent the release of any such photos or videos. The court decision was based on a law, a law created by Congress. The problem with Lieberman and Graham's proposal is not that it would impose the inconvenience of a law on the emperor, but that it would create a dangerous exception to a good law meant to restrain imperial abuses. Maybe in her next list Hurlburt will fill us in on the right "message about what photos might be suppressed, and why." In the meantime, Hurlburt's "And they won!" is exactly right, assuming you were able to invent an antecedent for "they." Progressives who favor the rule of law prevented the inclusion of a ban on releasing photos and videos of torture in the war supplemental. Having won that victory, however, it is now in the past. We should learn from it and move forward. The question before us is whether to support a war supplemental, and the fact that it could have had something else bad in it is irrelevant. Notice that reason number 1 for the war funding has nothing to do with the war funding. You want to end torture? Save $96.5 billion, and invest $0.5 billion in a special independent prosecutor's office.

"2. It makes it clear that the priority pathway for Guantanamo detainees is civilian trials in United States courts. Even as Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney and their wacky friends continue to suggest that American courts and prison guards can't do their jobs -- the same institutions that currently hold dozens of convicted terrorists, including the only convicted 9-11 conspirator -- Congress explicitly endorses bringing detainees to the US for civilian trials. That's a welcome rebuke to the drumbeat of "Khalid Sheikh Mohamed infiltrates your supermarket" we've been hearing on the Senate floor for the last month. I don't want to downplay the importance of the points still in contention -- where and how we imprison convicted detainees, and how we convince other countries to take in detainees if we don't take any ourselves. But with civilian trials a process begins which puts some of those decisions clearly in the hands of the executive and legislative branches -- and inside the rule of law, which was progressives' goal all along. Without civilian trials, no pathway to the rule of law exists. *Sometimes, the devil really is in the details. And these are devilish on both national security and human rights grounds. I don't want word getting out on where detainees are going 45 days in advance. Downgrade this to 'waiting to see the next move.'"

Hmm. Reason number 2 for the war money, again has nothing to do with that $97 billion for war. And what it does have to do with it gets completely wrong. The priority pathway for Guantanamo detainees is release and ought to include compensation and apology, because most of them are completely innocent of terrorism, having been purchased on the basis of no evidence or seized as soldiers, with no evidence against them ever having been found. The small minority of prisoners in Guantanamo -- not to mention Bagram and all the other sites -- who are not released, ought to be given fair and speedy trials and be released or punished according to the outcome. That ought not to be the "priority pathway." It ought to be what it has always been: the law. The law doesn't need Congress's endorsement. Congress should make laws, not endorse compliance with them. And citizens should act, not "wait to see the next move."

"3. It will move money to prevent meltdowns in countries hit hardest by the economic crisis. That's what the IMF money is for -- Pakistan, Hungary. And no, this isn't your 1990's 'Washington consensus' lending, with the kind of conditionality that the left loves to hate. This is in some ways the IMF returning to its original core mission -- stepping in as a temporary lender-of-last resort to economies in dire straits. The countries in question want the money. And, fiscal conservatives, it's a loan from us to the IMF. Backed by gold reserves. We get it back."

Well, what do you know. Reason number 3 to fund wars has nothing to do with war funding either. If I didn't know better, I'd say Heather was avoiding the subject. And once again, what Hurlburt does focus on, she gets upside down. A huge coalition of actual progressive groups did the same thing that 41 progressive Congress members did: demand that the bill be altered to prevent the usual destructive policies by the IMF. These progressives (oh, excuse me, leftists who love to hate things) were turned down flat. This IS the same old IMF that the nations it has "helped" in the past tend to hate. And the argument of the conservatives is that we don't have any money to lend even if we dream of getting it back. We'd still have to pay it back with interest to China or wherever it came from.

"4. It builds Obama's credibility overseas. Obama jammed a major increase in IMF support for poor countries hard-hit by the economic crisis into the April G20 Summit, over the objections of Europeans who wanted to focus only on re-writing market regulations and leave struggling countries (like Pakistan) to fend for themselves. Moving this money to the IMF in just two months will make it clear globally that Obama can deliver on his promises and heighten the likelihood that others deliver on theirs as well. And, as CAP's Nina Hachigian points out, this will increase our credibility at the IMF at a moment when China is building its own oomph."

Um, still no mention of the war funding in the war funding bill, and only two more loaves and fishes left to go. I, for one, do not think Congress should be in the business of passing catastrophic policies because the guy who is supposed to execute the will of Congress already ran around the world promising that Congress would do so. That's exactly backwards.

5. It's smaller. In a break from Bush Administration practice, the Obama Administration shifted a significant proportion of the Iraq and Afghanistan warfighting expenses back into the regular budget -- where they can be analyzed and debated and held up against other priorities.

Well, there you have it. The war funding is good because it's not as much war funding. Well, guess what, Hurlburt, progressives have a plan to make it even smaller and therefore even better. The plan is to pin down the 51 members who voted against it last time when it was guaranteed to pass, the 89 members who promised not to vote for war funding anymore, the 85 members who claim to want an exit from Afghanistan, and the 73 members who call themselves part of the Out of Iraq Caucus. We want at least 39 of these people to finally once and for all put our money where their mouths have been. We are close to having that many commitments.

6. It could be the last of its kind. The Obama Administration has also pledged to move all of the war-fighting expenses that are actually regular and foreseeable into the regular budgets. So there's a decent chance that, in future, members of Congress from all sides will lose the ability to push unpopular projects through by tying them to money for the troops on the ground.

Oh, well that settles it. Because the whole practice of passing this sort of bill is offensive and counterproductive, and there's not a single good word to be said about funding these wars, and because unpopular projects like bailouts for foreign banksters get loaded into bills like this one, the proper -- nay, the PROGRESSIVE -- thing to do is to let this bill pass, go home, and wait for the next move. How's your stomach?

1, 2, 3 What Are We Fighting For? The War Crimes Song-and-Dance Routine

dlindorff — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:41:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

We’re been here before, many times.

The US causes massive civilian deaths through its indiscriminate use of heavy air power, and then tries to claim it’s the enemy’s fault for “hiding” among the civilians and “using them as shields.”

In Vietnam, where the US was fighting against a local revolutionary movement that was seeking to overthrow the puppet regime backed by America, American planes routinely bombed and napalmed villages, claiming that the Viet Cong were hiding amongst the peasants. Women, old men and children would die in droves—several million of them by the time that war was over--and we’d be told it was all the fault of the Communists, who, we were told, had no regard for innocent life.

In Iraq, we took a city of 300,000, Fallujah, and effectively leveled it. Anyone who died there was presumed to be an insurgent, though the truth was, the Marines encircling the city before the onslaught only allowed fleeing women, girls and male children who were under the age 12 to flee, sending older boys and men seeking to get out back into the city to meet their fate.

Just this week, the brave Marines in Iraq blew away a 12-year-old boy after someone tossed a grenade their way. Local people said the grenade had been tossed by an older man standing near the boy, who fled. The unlucky boy, who was just a kid who sold gum for a living, had not done anything, local people said.

Now it’s Afghanistan, where upwards of 120 people, including babies and small children, were slaughtered during a battle in a remote part of the country in the latest example of mass deaths at the hands of American forces. Local people say that several villages in the Bala Baluk district of Farah Province of were intensely bombarded by US planes, causing most if not all of the deaths. The US response to the initial charges of a mass slaughter of civilians was to blame the deaths on the Taliban. When it became clear that the victims had died of burns and shrapnel, not from bullets, the US came out with a new explanation: The Taliban had tossed grenades at the locals. But reporters at the scene reported seeing huge craters and leveled buildings—not what you get from hand grenades. Then came reports of unusually deep and localized burns—the type caused by white phosphorus—a weapon that the US has used widely in Iraq--including in densely populated Fallujah—and in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon immediately said it did not use white phosphorus bombs in the battle in question, and suggested instead that perhaps the Taliban had used phosphorus grenades. This again was an absurd argument. The purpose of phosphorus weapons, primarily, is to light up a battlefield, but Taliban fighters don’t want lit up battlefields. They prefer operating the dark. It is the US that wants to light up targets.

Besides, there are those craters to explain.

So the next dance step was to say that the Taliban had caused the deaths, because during their retreat they had fled to the town, miles from the scene of the battle that led to the calling in of air support by US advisers to embattled government forces, and in so doing, had brought the attack upon the villagers.

Well, assuming that is true, there is still the problem that under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to attack an enemy where the risk of harming large numbers of civilians is too great. The extreme example would the bombing of a school full of children on the grounds that a few enemy soldiers were hiding in the school (something that the Israeli military did in Gaza during the recent invasion, causing the deaths of dozens of children). But bombing a town full of people in order to hit a few retreating enemy fighters is equally criminal—a point that the Pentagon, and the compliant US media, are ignoring.

Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan—for it is indeed his war now—is turning into the same kind of bloody imperial slaughter that Iraq was earlier under President Bush. The stated objective—eliminating Al Qaeda—has been lost. The enemy of all this fighting isn’t Al Qaeda at all; it is the indigenous Taliban—the former governing power in Afghanistan until the US invasion in 2001, and a political organization that never was an enemy of the US.

Whatever one might think of the religious fanatics and misogynists who go under the name Taliban, they are not seeking to overthrow the West. They are simply seeking to return to power in Afghanistan, one of the poorest, remotest, and economically and politically least important countries in the world.

And to defeat that movement, if that can even be done, the US is going to have to kill Afghani civilians by the truckload, as it has been doing.

And then there has to be the inevitable dancing around to hide the criminality of what the US is doing.

The blame-the-victim dance goes on.
_____________________

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, Seeing Darkness, Conjures Up the Mists of Time

dlindorff — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:56:59 -0400

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.

Friends and teachers recounted to me the terrors of that night,
when the entire city of several hundred thousand, built mostly of wood,
went up in a giant bonfire so hot and powerful that it sucked people
into it with a 200 mph vortex of inward rushing air. People who hid in
shelters were asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen, while those who tried
to flee sank knee deep into asphalt streets. Two mountains outside town
were man-made piles of rubble left over from the city’s ruins, which
were for the most part just carted away. There was little left to
rebuild.

While I was stunned by the horror of it, I at the time still felt
that after all, Germans had brought this disaster on themselves. After
all, they had allowed the Nazi monsters to gain control of the nation
and then proceeded with a genocidal campaign of extermination of
Jews—even German Jews who were their own neighbors--of Gypsies, of
gays, and of course, of Communists, and had launched a war that
ultimately killed 10s of millions of people around the world.

I mention all this because one thing I noticed back then, not among
young people in Germany, but among adults my parents’ age and older,
was a widespread denial about what Germany had done. And I remember
feeling, as many Americans and Europeans still do, and as many Chinese
and other Asians still feel about Japan, that these two countries have
never been willing to face up to the crimes that they, as a nation,
permitted to happen in their names.

Older and wiser now, I am well aware that our own country has
committed many crimes, some on a scale approaching those of Germany and
Japan: the near extermination of Native Americans, the mass,
centuries-long enslavement and cultural and physical destruction of
millions of African slaves, the use of nuclear bombs on civilian
targets, the decade-long saturation bombing and herbicidal poisoning of
most of Indochina…

It’s a long and terrible list, and for the most part, in our
schools, in our politics, in our histories, we don’t talk about, and
even justify and deny our own atrocities.

Now we have a president who is perhaps doing something worse.
Admitting that the last administration of President George Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney ordered up a program of illegal and inhuman
torture of captives in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and in the
so-called War on Terror that was launched by them in the wake of the
9-11 attacks in 2001, and offering up documentary evidence of the chain
of command that set the country on this criminal course, President
Obama now says that to move beyond this “dark and painful chapter in
our history,” he will not seek or permit any prosecution of those who
committed torture of captives.

“Nothing will be gained,” Obama said, “by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

I’m not that concerned about whether individual torturers in the
CIA or the military get prosecuted. If the president had said he would
not prosecute people who “thought” they were acting under proper
authority and behaving legally, but then added that he would pursue
those who authorized and ordered them to torture, I would not have
fussed. But that is not what he said. The implication of his statement,
and the fact that he has not, this far into his term, ordered his
Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor to investigate those who were
responsible for the crime, given what he clearly knows about its
authors, is the worst possible of travesties, and rises to the level of
a war crime itself.

Now I don’t want to equate America’s torture of a few hundred or a
few thousand captives by making them endure waterboarding or by placing
plastic neckbands and leashes on them and slamming their heads into
walls, with what the victims of Buchenwald or Auschwitz endured, but
that is really not the issue. The issue is, do we as a nation now
subscribe to the idea that the way to deal with evil perpetrated by
ourselves is to bury it?

Isn’t that precisely what we have been for decades accusing the
Germans and the Japanese of doing: burying in the mists of time their
criminal behavior as a people and as a nation?

And now our president—whose own wife and daughters are descendants
of slave victims of another era of American atrocities—is telling us we
should do the same thing as Germany and Japan: forget and move on.

But the president is wrong. Darkness does not go away when the fog comes. It just gets darker.

Let's shine a light. Sign the petition: No Amnesty for Torturers!

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest work
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

America's Imperial Wars: We Need to See the Sickening Reality

dlindorff — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:39:11 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

When I was a 17-year-old kid in my senior year of high school, I
didn’t think much about Vietnam. It was 1967, the war was raging, but I
didn’t personally know anyone who was over there, Tet hadn’t happened
yet. If anything, the excitement of jungle warfare attracted my
interest more than anything (I had a .22 cal rifle, and liked to go off
in the woods and shoot at things, often, I’ll admit, imagining it was
an armed enemy.)

But then I had to do a major project in my humanities program and I
chose the Vietnam War. As I started researching this paper, which was
supposed to be a multi-media presentation, I ran across a series of
photos of civilian victims of American napalm bombing. These victims,
often, were women and children—even babies.

The project opened my eyes to something that had never occurred to
me: my country’s army was killing civilians. And it wasn’t just killing
them. It was killing them, and maiming them, in ways that were almost
unimaginable in their horror: napalm, phosphorus, anti-personnel bombs
that threw out spinning flechettes that ripped through the flesh like
tiny buzz saws, and gunships that randomly spewed out so many
projectiles that everything within the range of several football fields
was killed or maimed almost instantly (all weapons still in use now)Afghan child burned by a US bomb.
I learned that scientists like what I at the time wanted to become were
actually working on projects to make these weapons even more lethal,
for example trying to make napalm more sticky so it would burn longer
on exposed flesh.

By the time I had finished my project, I had actively joined the
anti-war movement, and later that year, when I turned 18 and had to
register for the draft, I made the decision that no way was I going to
allow myself to participate in that war.

A key reason my—and millions of other Americans’--eyes were opened
to what the US was up to in Indochina was that the media at that time,
at least by 1967, had begun to show Americans the reality of that war.
I didn’t have to look too hard to find the photos of napalm victims, or
to read about the true nature of the weapons that our forces were using.

Today, while the internet makes it possible to find similar
information about the conflicts in the world in which the US is
participating, either as primary combatant or as the chief provider of
arms, as in Gaza, one actually has to make a concerted effort to look
for them. The corporate media which provide the information that most
Americans simply receive passively on the evening news or at breakfast
over coffee carefully avoid showing us most of the graphic horror
inflicted by our military machine.

We may read the cold fact that the US military, after initial
denials, admits that its forces killed not four enemy combatants in an
assault on a house in Afghanistan, but rather five civilians—including
a man, a female teacher, a 10-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy and a
tiny baby. But we don’t see pictures of their shattered bodies, no
doubt shredded by the high-powered automatic rifles typically used by
American forces.

We may read about wedding parties that are bombed by American
forces—something that has happened with some frequency in both Iraq and
Afghanistan-- where the death toll is tallied in dozens, but we are, as
a rule, not provided with photos that would likely show bodies torn
apart by anti-personnel bombs—a favored weapon for such attacks on
groups of supposed enemy “fighters.” (A giveaway that such weapons are
being used is a typically high death count with only a few wounded.)

Obviously one reason for this is that the US military no longer
gives US journalists, including photo journalists, free reign on the
battlefield. Those who travel with troops are under the control of
those troops and generally aren’t allowed to photograph the scenes of
devastation, and sites of such “mishaps” are generally ruled off limits
until the evidence has been cleared away.

But another reason is that the media themselves sanitize their
pages and their broadcasts. It isn’t just American dead that we don’t
get to see. It’s the civilian dead—at least if our guys do it. We are
not spared gruesome images following attacks on civilians by Iraqi
insurgent groups, or by Taliban forces in Afghanistan. But we don’t get
the same kind of photos when it’s our forces doing the slaughtering.
Because often the photos and video images do exist—taken by foreign
reporters who take the risk of going where the US military doesn’t want
them.

No wonder that even today, most Americans oppose the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan not because of sympathy with the long-suffering peoples
of those two lands, but because of the hardships faced by our own
forces, and the financial cost of the two wars.

For some real information on the horror that is being perpetrated
on one of the poorest countries in the world by the greatest military
power the world has ever known, check out the excellent work by
Professor Marc Herold at the University of New Hampshire (http://cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm and http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2008/10/06/the-imprecision-ofus-bombing-...).
__________________
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

liarswatch

Groundhog — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:51:50 -0400

Boy, if anybody ever realy F;;;:dup you people did. OBAMA is trying to take the USA down and you guys think its going to be good for you. YOU ARE ALL FOOLS.

Will `Tough Guy' Dick Cheney Cop Out as Usual and Take a Pardon?

dlindorff — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:29:33 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Vice President Dick Cheney has cultivated the image of a serious
tough guy, with his grim, scowling vissage, his dismissive "So?"
comments when things go badly, his unrepentant defense of torture,
including waterboarding, and his brash statements confirming that he
approved the interrogation measures that clearly violated US criminal
statutes and the Geneva Conventions.

But it appears we willl in a few days get to discover whether Cheney
really is a tough guy, or whether he is in truth just the same
corpulent, self-centered hypocrite and gutless coward that he was back
in the 1960s when, despite being a vocal backer of the Vietnam War, he
ducked the draft not once but five times by arranging for student and
marriage deferments, which he later defended by saying he had "other
priorities" than serving his country.

If, as most people expect, Cheney is offered a pardon by outgoing
President George Bush for his role in approving the systematic torture
of US captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, for his role in the
outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame and the subsequent
coverup of that crime, and for his role in lying about the alleged
threats posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the vice president will be
admitting that he is guilty of those crimes. He will also be taking the
coward's way out, after earlier strutting about and claiming to be in
the right.

It would be vintage Cheney--talking big but hiding from responsibility for his statements and his actions.

If Cheney were for real, he would tell Bush he doesn't want no
stinkin' pardon. He'd say he backed a policy of torture of captives
because they deserved it, because it would save American lives, and
because he had no respect for international law. He would dare the US
government, and other governments around the world that have a policy
of universal jurisdiction, to indict him and put him on trial for his
actions.

But that's not Dick Cheney's way. His way is to duck responsibility and to let lesser people take the heat for him.

We've seen his MO already. This is a guy who would furtively destroy
the career of a dedicated undercover agent, putting not just her, but
all of her in-country contacts in places like Iran at risk for their
lives, and then let a subordinate, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, take the
fall for him. Libby, recall, was convicted of lying about his role in
exposing Plame's identity in a federal trial that included considerable
evidence that it was his boss, Cheney, who was actually behind the
effort. He ended up being convicted and sentenced to prison, though he
was spared being locked up by a presidential clemency order. Cheney
didn't lift a finger to protect Libby, who remains a convicted felon,
unable to return to his practice of law.

If Bush pardons Cheney, and if Cheney accepts that pardon, he will
be admitting that he is a war criminal, willing to let a few
low-ranking soldiers who simply did what he says he wanted them to do
take the heat for him and his criminal actions.

While we're at it, it will also be interesting to see whether Bush,
whose media handlers have also spent the last eight years constucting
an image of him as a swaggering, tough-talkin' Texas cowboy, will grant
himself a broad pardon for his many crimes in office.

My guess is he will do both, confirming that this has been an
administration not of tough guys, but of cowards, hypocrites and
professional buckpassers.

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

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