LiarsWatch

Beyond Boondoggles

dlindorff — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:23:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Critics of government get all worked up when Washington spends money
stupidly, or does something manifestly stupid. There was a even senator
from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, who used to hand out "Golden Fleece"
awards for such things.

The Pentagon's notorious $600 payments for toilet seats that were
$12 in local discount stores, or $434 paments for hammers that were $10
in the local hardware store were good examples of this.

But nobody seems to be screaming about the incredibly wasteful
rescue of AIG, on which the government has spent first $85 billion and
now another $37.5 billion.

Bad enough that the Treasury Department is pumping an astonishing
$123.5 billion into a private company to prop it up, but what no one
has mentioned is that at the time of the initial announcement of an
$85-billion bailout, the insurance giant's stock had crashed so far
that it could have been bought outright by the government for a scant
$7 billion! That's small change by today's standards.

For $123.5 billion, the taxpayers have gotten warrants that could,
if exercised, end up giving "us" 80 percent of the company, but if the
government had just gone ahead and bought 100 percent of AIG right
away, it would have only cost about five percent of that amount.

Talk about a "Golden Fleece" award!

The money is now flying so thick and fast--$700 billion here, $37.5
billion there, $25 billion to the auto industry, $900 billion to buy up
short term corporate debt, hundreds of billions of dollars more to buy
stakes in failing banks--that we've simply lost sight of what we the
taxpayers are getting for our money, or whether the government is even
bargaiining for good deals.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson reportedly came up with the initial
$700 billiion figure for the Wall Street bailout off the top of his
head, with the only consideration being that the number be large enough
to "shock" investors into feeling confident.

Before another dollar of borrowed cash is spent on this binge,
Congress should call urgent hearings to look into what's being paid and
what the taxpayers are getting for their money. Any deals--like the AIG
boondoggle--that were clearly bad should be halted and reconsidered.

My suspicion is that with AIG, ideology intruded. The Bush
administration doesn't want to be seen as simply nationalizing banks
and insurance companies--the kind of thing they condemn Venezuela's
Hugo Chavez or Cuba's Castro for doing. But they are doing that anyhow,
and on a much bigger scale than Chavez or Castro ever dreamed of--just
not overtly. And to avoid overt takeovers, they are spending many
multiples of hundreds of billions of dollars just taking over the
liabilities of companies that they could have taken over lock, stock
and barrel for a fraction of the cost.

Left out of consideration is the incredible carnage this is certain
to cause down the road. Every penny that is being spent on this rolling
bailout is borrowed money. As an NPR reporter quite accurately noted in
a report yesterday on Britain's colossal $900-billion bailout of UK
banks, that borrowed money will have to be repaid by taxpayers over
time, and will come at the expense of other things that the public
wants, like Britain's vaunted National Health Plan, education, etc.

We don't hear much about that on the reporting, even on NPR, about
the US bailout, but it is equally true here. The bailout is doing to
the nation's public funding in a few short weeks what Ronald Reagan and
his budget director David Stockman tried to do over the course of two
presidential terms off office: bankrupt the government to kill off
social spending.

As of this point, if all these allocated funds being thrown at
financial institutiions are spent, there will be no money left for
health care, education, infrastructure, environmental protection,
national parks, Social Security, welfare assistance, or critical things
like consumer protection and worker safety. Truth to tell, there won't
be any money left for the military either--probably the only good thing
you can say about this mess.

It's enough to make one think that this is all some final disastrous
plot by the Bush/Cheney administration to bring on a collapse of what
remnants were left of the old New Deal and Great Society programs
before leaving Washington. And that's not such a wild notion. The whole
eight years of Republican rule in Washington has been a giant wrecking
game.

If some KGB mastermind, back in the late 1960s (perhaps young Vlad
Putin?), had dreamed up a scheme to capture the child of a leading
American political family, and re-program him to become a kind of
"Manchurian Candidate" who would return and work his way into the
presidency, from which high office he would destroy the country, he
could not have accomplished more than President Bush has done.

The financial fiasco and the subsequent bailout boondoggle is the final blow--one from which the nation may well never recover.
____________________

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 edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36728';
digg_title = "Beyond Boondoggles";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n\r\nCritics of government get all worked up when Washington spends money stupidly, or does something manifestly stupid. There was a even senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, who used to hand out \"Golden Fleece\" awards for such things.\r\n\r\nThe Pentagon\'s notorious $600 payments for toilet seats that were $12 in local discount stores, or $434 paments for hammers that were $10 in the local hardware store were good examples of this.\r\n\r\nBut nobody seems to be screaming about the incredibly wasteful rescue of AIG, on which the government has spent first $85 billion and now another $37.5 billion.\r\n\r";
digg_skin = 'standard';

Surprise! Congress Listened to the Voting Public!

dlindorff — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:43:24 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The most entertaining thing about this Wall Street crisis and the
refusal of the House of Representatives (not failure but refusal) to
pass a bailout bill negotiated by the Bush White House and the House
leadership is how shocked and upset those leaders and the pundit class
have been by the idea that members of Congress would actually heed the
wishes of their constituents!

The Founding Fathers always saw the lower house of Congress as
voice of the people—the elected body that, because its members had to
face the voters every two years, would be most responsive to public
sentiment.

Because of the power of money and the role of the corporate media
in filtering the information that voters get about what is actually
going on, that close connection between public and public servant in
the House has long ago broken down. This time, however, because the
crisis hit within five weeks of the national election, and because the
crisis involved something that everyone cares about—their money—it
worked.

The public is paying attention, and most of us got it. It was
obvious that Congress and the White House were out to screw us out of
our money in order to protect the millionaire and billionaire traders
and conmen who have been running the Wall Street casino for the last
decade and a half without any adult supervision.

Now that people are paying attention, it will be interesting to see
how these corrupt leaders, Democrat and Republican, will fashion that
bailout and get it passed. Once aroused from their TV-induced slumber,
the American public may not be willing to get rolled. If the anger
grows, and the calls and emails to Congress—which brought down the
Capitol website Monday and jammed the switchboard for several days
beginning last week—continue to flood in threatening an electoral
Armageddon for those who back a bailout, Congress may yet be unable to
pass a bill.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

Now let’s make something clear. The stock market crash that
happened on Monday was no crisis. The market can rise and fall with
little or no significant impact on the broader economy, or even on
those who have their retirement income invested in equities. While
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and House
leaders like Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Minority Leader John Boehner may
point frantically to the falling Dow as a dire warning to members of
Congress to take action, it is all just scaremongering.

The real issue is not the stock market—it’s the credit markets. And
these have been shut down to borrowers—both individuals and
corporates—for months. Which means that there is no sudden urgency to
pass a lousy, rip-off bailout bill in days without proper hearings and
investigations into what is really needed.

The Bush Administration’s whole idea here from the start was to use
scare-mongering and high-pressure tactics honed in the 2002 campaign to
gin up a war against Iraq to get a bill through Congress that would
make a virtual dictator out of the Treasury Secretary, and to siphon a
trillion dollars or more out of taxpayers’ accounts and into the
pockets of the already stunningly rich financial class. It was to be
one final wrecking ball by the Bush/Cheney gang launched at the
American economic and political system, allowing the people who have
run the country into the ground over the last eight years, and their
financial backers to walk away with all the cookies.

It could still happen if the public doesn’t stay fired up and
angry. But for now, it’s at least exciting and deeply satisfying to see
the Administration, and the cowards who run the so-called Democratic
opposition in Congress, scrambling frantically to come up with a scheme
to get this ripoff passed.

What should happen? Congressional Democrats should put a hold on any action until after Election Day, which after all is only five weeks off. They should say that the voters must be heard on this critical national issue of how to rescue the economy and fix the financial system. Hearings should be scheduled in the relevant committees—oversight, banking, securities regulation, housing, the elderly, health and human services, etc. (yes, Rep. Dennis Kucinich is right in observing that given that most bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical emergencies, if the US had national healthcare, we wouldn’t have the housing foreclosure crisis)—and a special prosecutor should be established to look into the corruption behind all the recent financial sector failures. The real victims of the deregulatory orgy need to be heard, as do some of the 200 economists (including at least three nobel laureates) who have opposed this bailout. Then when the true nature and extent of the crisis and its causes have been laid out in clear public view, along with some real solutions for real people, appropriate legislative reforms should be drawn up, debated and voted upon, to be finally enacted into law.

No rush to judgment! No short-circuiting of the critical process of hearings!

The economy will survive this process.

What we cannot survive is a continuation of secret government, backroom deals and trillion-dollar bailouts.

BACK TO THE PHONES!
_______________________
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 edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Iraq All Over Again: Bush, Paulson and Bernanke are Just Crying Wolf

dlindorff — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:09:57 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Hold everything!

Talk about déjà vu. Remember when Bush and his cabinet officers were
running all over in late 2002 crying wolf about Iraq’s supposed nukes,
and threatening that inaction on a war resolution by the Congress would
leave them to blame when the “mushroom cloud” appeared over some
American city?

Well, now they’re doing it again, this time claiming that economic
Armageddon faces the US and even the global economy if Congress doesn’t
hand over all power over the economy to the Secretary of the Treasury
in absolute contravention of the most fundamental principle of the
Constitution, which establishes that the budget be in the control of
Congress. These guys are saying if Congress doesn’t vote to hand over
$700 billion or more of taxpayer money to the Treasury to dole out to
fat cat bankers, the resulting economic collapse will be on their heads.

But here’s the thing. Just as nobody else in the world was freaking
out about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear threat, nobody is
particularly panicked about the US or the global economy. If investors,
who are supposed to be all wise about things economic, were worried
that the roof was about to cave in, they’d be selling stocks as fast as
they could dial their brokers. And the institutional investors—those
with the real inside information—not to mention the managements of
companies, who really know the true state of affairs of their own
firms—would be unloading shares at fire sale prices. The stock market
would be falling like it fell in 1987, or, if what these administration
con artists are claiming were really the case, even farther. That is to
say, we’d be seeing a 3000-4000 point drop in the Dow.

But we’re not seeing that. The Dow Jones average this week fell a
modest 8 percent and then recovered by 4 percent, and yesterday, the
broader S&P index actually rose. Some panic!

We’re told that there is a credit crisis, but people are still
getting mortgages. I know a retired woman of modest means who just went
in and refinanced her mortgage at a lower rate. Businesses are still
receiving loans, too, and while they might want a lower rate, they’re
still meeting payroll. Banks haven’t jacked up interest rates to absurd
levels.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told
a select group of Congressional leaders earlier this week that if they
didn’t rush through their three-page proposal giving them draconian
power to shovel public money into banker’s coffers, the country would
be instantly plunged into a major recession.

But when Congress balked at this power-grabbing rip-off, it caused
barely a ripple in the stock markets, which are down less than 10
percent from their level when the crisis first struck with the bailout
of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Let’s be honest: this is an artificial panic, or worse, an effort
to create one. It’s not a real panic. When you have the president and
the treasury secretary and the Fed chairman going around warning of a
steep recession or a depression, you have to ask yourself why these
guys are yelling “Fire!” in the theater. In a real crisis, President
Franklin Roosevelt preached calm (“We have nothing to fear but fear
itself.”). This president says, “Be afraid. Real afraid!”

The truth is, this is a very normal economic downturn, with the
exception that a lot of banks are holding an unusual amount of really
rotten debt—the result of their own greed and fraud.

The answer is not to bail these rotten institutions out. It’s to let them fail.

I realized what was happening when the Bush Administration spent
$85 billion assuming all the bad debt of AIG in return for warrants
giving it the right to up to 80 percent ownership of the insurance
giant, when, at that day’s share value, the Treasury could have bought
the whole company outright for just $7 billion.

If we’re concerned about the homeowners who hold subprime
mortgages, the government can step in and order the banks to
renegotiate the terms of those loans to make them fixed 30-year
mortgages that people can actually afford to pay, and it can step in
and guarantee them. In return for covering the bankers’ asses on those
loans, the government can take over the worst banks, and take ownership
positions in others as it sees fit.

If the economy slows down because of all of this, the answer is for
the government to start spending on programs that will create new
jobs—R&D funding for new non-carbon energy sources, public funded
power generation projects using wind, waves and solar energy,
infrastructure repair, public transit expansion, more teachers for our
schools. Every dollar spent on these kinds of things will circulate
back into the economy immediately, helping to bring the economy back.
Funneling money to banks won’t help, because the odds are, much of it
will flow overseas where there’s a better return.

In short, Congress needs to call the president’s bluff.

The public knows it’s being had here. We’ve seen the deceitful
nature of this administration, and we know now that everything it says
is a lie.

Bush and his treasury secretary, however, are right about one
thing: Congress is going to be blamed if they do the wrong thing. But
the wrong thing isn’t failing to approve a $700-billion Wall Street
bailout. The wrong thing would be approving it.
________________________
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 edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

McCain/Palin Campaign Relies on Lazy Thinking and Prejudice to Win

dlindorff — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:17:45 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I got an urgent email from an uncle of mine yesterday evening. A
sweet man, retired career military and very religious, he was genuinely
worried about an email he had received purporting to convey an article
said to have been written by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and
published on June 29, 2008 alleging that much of the Obama campaign's
"small donations" over the Internet had actually come from several Arab
sources overseas.

Now I could see before reading two paragraphs of the alleged column
he forwarded to me that it was not Dowd's acerbic and witty writing
style, but I cannot expect most people who don't even read Dowd to know
that. Two minutes at the computer, however, and I was easily able to
confirm, as anyone could do, that Dowd had never written the article. A
search of the New York Times archive showed she had written on a wholly
different topic--Hillary Clinton--on that day, and moreover, the
non-partisan truth-checking website Snopes.com had a full documented debunking of the scam.

Why this particular campaign dirty trick--and with Karl Rove in the
back seat of the McCain campaign bus I have no doubt that it originated
in the bowels of that campaign, which has not disavowed it--works, and
why the many other vile efforts, like the latest shameful official
McCain TV ad claiming that Obama backs "sex education for
kindergartners," work is that many otherwise decent Americans like my
uncle first of all are primed to believe such crap by a deep-seated
prejudice against people of color, and secondly that the corporate
media which are supposed to be informing us are afraid to call out a
mainstream political candidate for lying and deceiving the public.
Some, like Fox, actually promote these falsehoods.

Look at the news today. Instead of exposing the blatant campaign of
character assassination by the McCain/Palin campaign, it is focused on
the bogus (and frivolous) claim by the McCain campaign that Obama has
called Palin a "pig with lipstick"! (What did Obama really do? He said
that the McCain/Palin ticket's attempt to portray itself as an
anti-pork, anti-Washington, reform campaign is like putting lipstick on
a pig--a common expression used by McCain himself.) The issue becomes
not "Is the McCain campaign charge true?" but rather "Should Obama have
to apologize to Palin?"

What's depressing about this is how well the McCain campaign's swim
in the sewer is working. A nice kid I know who works at our local
garage told me that he couldn't vote for Obama, despite liking his
policies, "because he'll take his oath of office on the Koran." Aside
from the anti-Muslim bias inherent in this statement, it is based upon
false information being spread virally through the internet falsely
claiming, on the basis of no evidence, that Obama is a secret Muslim
and that he took his Senate oath of office on a Koran.

People on the left may wish that Obama were a more overtly
progressive and more expressly anti-war candidate. I certainly do. But
let's get real here for a minute. With the black-baiting that is going
on by the other side, and the gullible and terribly uninformed or even
misinformed electorate out there, and with a national media that will
simply repeat and spread whatever bilious and false charges are made by
the McCain campaign, what chance on earth would a candidate like Obama
have if he were to call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, or for a
government-run medical insurance program? Those who call angrily for
such unambiguous positions by Obama are deluding themselves.

I really have to laugh. He'd be labeled a traitor and a communist,
and you know what? Absent a real analysis and absent critical reporting
by the mainstream media, 90 percent of the American public would
unthinkingly buy that false and ludicrous characterization.

I used to have a higher opinion of my fellow Americans, who had a
reputation for common sense. I used to believe that if a candidate told
them that it made no sense to put insurance companies in charge of
their health care and that people were much healthier and less anxious
about their health and their lives, and spent less on health care in
countries like Canada or Sweden or Germany or France where their health
care was guaranteed by the state, if a candidate told them that half
the money being spent on the US military was a waste and did nothing to
make the nation safer, if a candidate told them that human life on this
planet was in grave danger if nothing was done to seriously reduce
carbon emissions by half or even more, that they would listen and vote
accordingly. I used to think that if only Ralph Nader could shoehorn
his way into the national debates, a wave of popular support would
sweep him into the White House. (And let's be honest here. We on the
left are not immune from this poison of ignorance. I cannot tell you
how many otherwise intelligent people on the left keep writing me to
say that the entire foreign policy of the United States is being
secretly run by "Israel and the Zionists.")

I no longer hold that high opinion. Sure, if this nation were
educating people to think critically--which is not being done--if we
had a media that had a core ethos of getting at the truth and making it
known--which we don't--I would have that confidence. But I think it is
clear that we have traveled so far down the road of creating an
ignorant and fearful electorate that any candidate making such bold
claims would be doomed to either a devastating loss, or to minor party
status. Nader, for example, whose ancestry is Lebanese Christian, were
he to begin to rise in the polls to become a serious candidate, would
certainly be portrayed as a Muslim Manchurian candidate, and it
wouldn't matter what he said or stood for after that.

I don't know what this dismal state of affairs means in terms of
the future direction of American politics, but it doesn't bode well for
the future of third parties, or for the Democratic Party, or for the
country, or for the fate of the world.

And that is the truth.
________________
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 edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Pelosi Confesses Knowing the Truth About Bush's War Based on Lies: "I don't know what could have been done..." Tell her!

Chip — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:38:56 -0400

Begins at 4:51.

Q: If you were to go back and change anything from your political career, what would it be?

A: Well, of course, the biggest disappointment for me is that we are still in this war in Iraq, and, ah, I had always thought at the time that, that, ah, people knew the truth they would not vote for this war and, I don't know what else, er, not have been supportive of this, I don't know what else we could have done, ah, but this has been the most damaging to us: loss of life, over 4,000, tens of thousands injured, many thousands of them permanently, cost in dollars, which is small compared to the loss of life and limb but the cost in dollars to the tune of trillions of dollars, the cost of reputation in the world, the cost in our military readiness, our capabi...eroding our...undermining our military capability to protect our interests wherever they are threatened, undermining our ability to fight the real war on terror which is in Afghanistan, uh, I don't know what else could have been done, ah, but I keep revisiting that every step of the way to think what could we have done to stop this President from taking us into a war on the basis of a false premise, without the proper preparation of our troops, without a plan for success, a strategy to leave, ah, that is where we have been for more than 2 years, we're there 2 years longer than we were in World War II.

Nobody's Hero: My War Story

dlindorff — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:32:53 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I’m certainly no hero, but since some readers of my last post have
reacted by attacking my courage and integrity on the grounds that I
“never served,” I want to at least set the record straight on my
youthful response to war.

In 1967, when I was a senior in high school in Storrs, CT., I faced
a momentous decision. In April, I would turn 18, and would have to
register for the draft. The Vietnam War was by then in full swing. A
year or two earlier, I’d been an avid fan of military aviation
magazines, and bought into the whole anti-Communist Cold War thing. But
by ’67, I had seen enough of the violence being done in Vietnam against
a desperately poor peasant population—the napalm attacks on civilians,
the burned babies, etc.—that I had done a 180-degree turn. I wanted
nothing to do with war and killing. So I made a decision: I would fill
out my registration at the draft board, and I’d get my draft card, but
I would not let myself be inducted into the military.

When I told my parents, who still supported the war, of my plan,
they were of course upset but supportive. My dad was an engineer and a
former Marine and my mother a Navy WAVE in WWII. My paternal
grandfather had earned a silver star in WWI and my maternal grandfather
had had his lungs permanently scarred by mustard gas in the same
conflict. A history teacher, Bernie Marlin, referred me to a junior
high teacher in the school who had been a conscientious objector during
the Korean War. I talked with him, a Mr. Storrs, at length, and was
very impressed with his story, but I soon realized that I didn’t really
think I was CO material. I did feel war could be justified
sometimes—for example if America were attacked. At any rate, in early
April of ’67, I went ahead and filled out my draft registration form.

That fall, I began college at Wesleyan University. By then, I had
been working as a foot soldier in the anti-war movement a bit, and had
already been to one anti-war demonstration and march in New York City.
At college registration, there was a table for registering for a
student deferment. I decided on the spur of the moment to pass that up.
It seemed unfair to me that friends of mine in high school, who were
not college bound, were going to get drafted, but I wouldn’t because I
was lucky enough to be going to college. So unlike Vice President and
Warmonger-in-Chief Dick Cheney, I just skipped it. I figured when my
time came and I got an induction notice, I would just refuse, and
they’d jail me.

In October, there was a huge demonstration and march in Washington
against the war—the famous “Mobe” about which Norman Mailer wrote in
“Armies of the Night.” I went down to DC with a few other students. We
ended up near the front of the march, and then up on the Mall of the
Pentagon. Through the night, federal marshals were arresting people up
there on the Mall. I made it through until morning, when I was finally
grabbed by the legs, yanked through a line of bayonet-armed soldiers,
beaten with clubs and carried off to a paddy wagon, which took me to a
federal minimum-security prison in Occoquan, VA. I spent a couple days
there in the company of a hundred or so other demonstrators in a prison
dormitory. It was an education like no other. Veteran anti-war and
civil rights activists ran workshops about the war and about a strategy
of resistance, and about how we could build a better world. I soaked it
all up avidly.

When I was released, with a small fine and a 10-day suspended
sentence for “trespassing” on the Pentagon, I hitchhiked back to
school, all fired up to challenge the war. The night before my arrest,
I had joined hundreds of other protesters in burning my draft card. I
had kept the ashes in my shirt pocket, and when I got home, I put them
in an envelope and mailed them to my draft board, with a note saying I
would never carry that card again (a federal crime). My draft board
responded by sending me a new I-A card. I tucked it in my wallet,
saving it for the next card-burning opportunity.

Over the next two years, during which time I participated actively
in student radical activism, building sit-ins, and draft-resistance
actions, such as informational picketing of inductees at the induction
center in New Haven, CT, I had occasion to burn my card and tear up my
card several times—including once at a communion at the Yale chapel,
where we turned our cards in to Rev. William Sloane Coffin. Each time,
I’d send the ashes or the pieces of card to my draft board, and each
time, they’d send me a new one. Along the way, the infamous draft
lottery was established. I was number 81—a certainty to be called up.

At one point, back in the summer of 1968, I filed a CO application,
but I made it clear that I was not religious, and that I was not
opposed to all wars. When I had my CO hearing at the draft board, the
board members were sitting at a table, with all my destroyed draft
cards set in a pile in front of them. I explained to the men sitting in
judgement on me that while I opposed the war in Vietnam, if I were
Vietnamese, I would surely be fighting for my country against the US.
That didn’t go over very well. My application was unanimously rejected.

My day came in the spring of 1969. At the time, I was in a full leg
cast, having broken both bones in my lower leg just above the ankle in
a ski accident. I notified the induction center that I was on crutches
and in a cast and suggested they postpone my pre-induction physical
until I was out of the cast and all better—a delay of about four months
according to my doctor. They said no. They wanted to see me to make
sure I was genuinely injured.

So on a cold late-winter day, I found myself on a bus riding from
the draft board in Rockville, CT to New Haven with a bunch of
frightened young men. I handed out informational packets to everyone,
telling them their rights, how to apply for CO status, etc., and talked
about what was wrong with the war.

When we arrived, I joined everyone in taking the so-called
intelligence test. Then we went for our physicals. I was pulled from
the line and told I needed to go to see a consulting physician at
Yale-New Haven Hospital. Since the address was a mile or so away, and
the sidewalks were icy, I said I’d need cab fare. I was told by the
head of the medical unit that the government didn’t pay for
transportation. He informed me there was a bus that stopped outside
that would take me there.

I replied that I was on crutches, and that I hadn’t asked to be sent
to a consultation—in fact I had asked for a postponement until my leg
was healed—and said that if they wanted to send me anywhere they could
fucking well pay for the transportation. That didn’t make the guy very
happy. He had a screaming fit, and called the head of the center, who
came down. “What’s the problem?” he asked. I explained the situation,
and said that if they wanted me to go all the way to a hospital because
they didn’t trust that my leg was truly broken, they could pay my
fucking cab fare. The guy got angry, called me a “little prick,” but
then took out his wallet and threw some bills at me. I picked the money
up off the floor and went down to the street. Seeing no cab, I went
over to the bus stop. I looked up and saw the Induction Center
commander looking out of a window, so as the bus pulled up, I flipped
him a one-finger salute and got on.

At the hospital, I discovered that the office of the doctor in
question was closed for the day. Angry that I’d wasted all this time
for nothing, I got back on the bus and returned to the Induction
Center. This time, I went directly to the office of the head of the
center, and tossed an envelope of X-Rays from my doctor on his desk.
“It’s no wonder you’re losing the fucking war!” I said. “You guys can’t
even arrange a doctor’s appointment. The office was closed.” I told him
that he could check my X-Rays, and added, “But I’ve come down here once
already, and it’s the last time I’m coming. If you want me back, you
can send the FBI to bring me.” I hung around until the end of the day
and rode home on the bus to my draft board.

When I got there, I went into the office, where the office
secretary, an older woman with a neat grey perm, was still at her desk.
“Excuse me,” I said. “But I’m really pissed off.” She started at my
coarse language. I recounted my experience and she said, “Well, I think
they owe you an apology.” To my astonishment, she picked up the phone,
called the Induction Center, and asked to speak to the head of the
operation—the guy who’d thrown the money at me. “I have a young man
here who is very angry,” she said into the phone. “And I think you owe
him an apology.”

She handed me the phone.

“All right, you little prick,” he said, sounding like he was gritting his teeth. “I’m sorry.”

“You fuckin’ oughta be,” I said, again shocking the secretary.

I put down the phone, thanked the secretary and left.

A month later, to my astonishment, instead of FBI agents at my door,
I got a letter from my draft board. It was a card declaring me to be
IV-F—“unfit for military service.”

Clearly, there was no medical justification for my rejection. My leg
bones healed up just fine a few months later, and I spent part of the
next year loading heavy boxes in a warehouse and driving semi-trailer
trucks. I suspect that, it being 1969, and the army in Nam being by
then in a state of near insurrection, the Army had concluded it didn’t
want people like me anymore. Perhaps a year earlier, before Tet, I
might instead have been sent into the infantry.

I tell this story because while it may not be heroic, and while
other war resisters paid heavily for their stands, I nonetheless think
it contrasts well with the likes of a Dick Cheney, who hid through the
war years behind student deferments and his wife’s skirt, or of a
George Bush, who joined the Air National Guard and made care to check a
box saying he would be “unavailable for overseas duty”—something the
poor guys in the Guard now doing multiple tours in the Iraqi desert on
Bush's orders didn’t have the option of doing.

I don’t apologize for my opposition to the Vietnam War. And while
being prepared to go to jail for a principle may not rank on the
courage meter anywhere near to standing one’s ground under fire during
an enemy assault, or jumping on top of a live grenade, I’m proud that I
did my best to oppose it, and that I never once tried to duck
responsibility for my own actions. Furthermore, I’ll stand my actions
up against any of those in the Bush administration or in Congress who
are so quick to support wars, but who hid behind student deferments or
used powerful connections to avoid military service or combat duty
themselves when it was their turn to “serve.”
__________________

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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digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\nI’m certainly no hero, but since some readers of my last post have reacted by attacking my courage and integrity on the grounds that I “never served,” I want to at least set the record straight on my youthful response to war.\r\n\r";
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Videos from June 13 Iraq Forum, "Reframing the Iraq War Discussion," in Cherry Hill, NJ

dlindorff — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:16:21 -0400

Adam Kokesh of Iraq Veterans Against the War (Part 1)

Kokesh Reams Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ) for Backing the War (Part 2)

Dave Lindorff on the Bush/Cheney Push for War with Iran (Part 1)

Dave Lindorff on the Bush/Cheney Push for War with Iran (Part 2)

Keeping America Safe from Child "Terrorists"

dlindorff — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:53:16 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the rest of the
warmongers and terror-pimps in the White House would have us believe
that Omar Khadr is a monster. Khadr is the 21-year-old Canadian who is
facing one of the first show-trials at Guantanamo.

But let’s just step back a minute and consider Mr. Khadr’s case.

The son of an alleged Islamic fundamentalist, Khadr was sent to one
of those fundamentalist madrassa schools in Pakistan back when he was
14. From there, he went to Afghanistan, to join with the Taliban in
fighting against the remnant warlord backers of the Soviet Union, which
had attempted to run Afghanistan as a vassal state.

Then came 9-11 and the October 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan.
Young Khadr suddenly found himself fighting against the world’s most
powerful military.

In 2002, after the Taliban government had fallen, Khadr was still
out in the hills with the forces of resistance. The Taliban government
was gone, but the war was not over. In fact it’s still not over, with
the Taliban resurgent in much of Afghanistan.

In this situation, with some 20,000 US and European troops battling
across Afghanistan, Khadr, by then at the ripe age of 15, found himself
with a group of five older fighters in a compound up in the hills. Some
US Special Forces came on the location, and, peeking through cracks in
the door, saw the group, armed with AK rifles. They called on the men
to surrender, but the men allegedly refused.

At that point the brave Americans called in an air strike, and
clobbered the building. After that softening up, they went inside to
pick up the pieces.

Someone at that point, and US military prosecutors claim it was the
wounded Khadr, tossed a grenade while lying injured on the ground. The
grenade killed Special Forces Sergeant Christopher Speer. Speer’s
comrades opened fire, with three of them hitting Khadr.

When they went to check on him, the critically injured, yet
miraculously still living Khadr reportedly pleaded, “Shoot me!”
Reportedly, some of Sgt. Speer’s buddies were ready to do just that.
Apparently the “clicking” of injured captives by American forces (a war
crime) is not uncommon, and even has its own slang word. But a medic
with the group interceded and stopped the battlefield execution, and
took action to save Khadr’s life.

Khadr was eventually shipped off to Guantanamo, at the age of 15,
in violation of a 2002 protocol signed by the US which extended the
protection of the Geneva Conventions against imprisoning child soldiers
from the prior “under 15” standard to “under 18.” No matter, “bad guy”
Khadr would be one of at least 2500 children that the US has admitted
to incarcerating in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere as
“enemy combatants.”

Today, Khadr is 21. He has spent the second half of his teenage
years confined in a prison camp on the naval base at Guantanamo.

This is what Bush and Cheney are really referring to when they
assure us that they are holding “the worst of the worst” on the island
of Cuba.

They are keeping us safe from 15-year-old boys.

And what, exactly, is Omar Khadr’s “crime”?

As far as I can tell, if he did toss that grenade (and there is
testimony from American witnesses that the thrower may have been
another man, who was killed in the resulting US barrage of fire), Khadr
was simply demonstrating extraordinary bravery of the kind that would
earn a silver star, at least, had it been a US soldier or marine doing
the same thing under the same circumstances. Consider: he and his
comrades-in-arms, battling in defense of their religion and, in some
cases, their nation, were bombarded from the air. They were then
approached by armed US troops—the very ones who had called in the air
strike. This was a battle, and it was not over yet. For all Khadr knew,
those US soldiers were going to kill them all. And in any event, Khadr
and his fellow fighters had a right to defend themselves to the death
to prevent capture. Sure it's unfortunate that Sgt. Speer was killed,
but that's what happens in wars.

Still, a fighter killing another fighter during warfare is not the
act of a “terrorist.” It may be brutal and it may be tragic, but it is
the act of a soldier. That soldier, if captured, is not a criminal, but
a POW. Moreover, if he is a child, the Geneva Conventions and the
subsequent protocol mentioned above, require that he be treated not as
a POW but as a victim of war.

Bush and Cheney don’t want to admit that the people fighting US
forces in Afghanistan are legitimate soldiers, entitled to protection
under the rules of war. They want us to believe that anyone who takes
up a gun in defense of their homeland or of the homeland of their
allies, and fights against the US military forces that are spread all
over the globe like Roman Legions of old, are “terrorists,” deserving
of whatever fate we hand them, by whatever rules we want to gin up.

But it’s worth remembering that this particular “terrorist,” at the
time of his “crime,” was simply a scared and badly-wounded 15-year-old
kid who had the balls to toss a grenade at well-armed soldiers on a
search-and-destroy mission.

In an interesting twist that further highlights the absurdity of calling a 15-year-old a hardened terrorist, Speer's widow, Tabitha, and another soldier who lost an eye in the grenade blast, sued not Khadr, but his father's estate, claiming that his "failure to control his son" had been the proximate cause of their losses. A federal district judge, in February 2006, awarded the two $102.6 million in damages. In other words, the court concluded Khadr wasn't responsible for his actions; his father was. And yet the US is prosecuting Omar Khadr for being a terrorist.

The Bush/Cheney administration’s incarceration and prosecution of
this boy was a war crime. His continued incarceration and the attempt
to prosecute him as a terrorist today makes a mockery of America’s
motto: Home of the Brave.

We should all be ashamed.

_____________
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

Time for Congress to Stand Up in Its Own Defense: Impeach Bush and Cheney N

dlindorff — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:24:50 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The last couple of weeks have brought confirmation—as if it were needed—even in the corporate media, that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the gang of thugs and sycophants around them in the White House, engaged in a massive conspiracy to lie the country into a war in Iraq.

The release of a confessional book by former White House press spokesman Scott McClellan and the subsequent release of a long blocked report by the Senate Intelligence Committee make it clear that Bush, Cheney & Company deliberately lied to Congress and the American public back in 2002 and early 2003 about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein (there was none). McClellan also states that Bush and Cheney conspired to “out” CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, as part of a compaign to prevent her husband from exposing a major part of that campaign of lies: the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons.

It would be hard to overstate the extent of or the damage caused by these crimes that are now exposed to the light of day.

Beginning in 2001, making the most cynical use of the tragic killing of nearly 3000 Americans in the 9-11 attacks, Bush and Cheney moved to aggrandize as much power as possible in the executive, and then, to consolidate that power grab, engineered a full-scale war against Iraq, enabling them to claim that any opponent of their dictatorial usurpation of power was a traitor to the nation.

It was all a lie.

Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaeda, and he had no nuclear program. He had no weapons of mass destruction. His country was broken, thanks to years of international sanctions and war.

As a result of these lies, we have a country that no longer even remotely resembles what the Founders had intended. The Congress has been shorn of its once exclusive authority to legislate, and even its Constitutional power to investigate the executive branch has been successfully defied. It is now an atrophied relic. The federal judiciary, right up to the Supreme Court, has been packed with administration sycophants and Federalist Society advocates of unfettered executive power.

We also have been saddled with an unwinnable war in the Middle East that has claimed the lives of 4500 Americans, destroyed the lives of another 30,000—or perhaps several hundred thousand, if we add in all those suffering psychological damage, or genetic damage from exposure to depleted uranium weapons. That war has also killed over 1 million innocent Iraqis, including countless chiildren, destroyed their country, bankrupted this nation, and made the US a pariah and a rogue state in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Most Americans long since came to the conclusion that the Bush administration was a gang of idiots. Just watching their handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster unfold was enough to make that clear. But the new reports from McClellan and from the Senate Intelligence Committee should make it clear that this was not just stupidity. The disasters that have befallen this nation, or that it has brought on the rest of the world, over the past eight years have been the result of deliberate lying and deceit and of the conspiratorial policies of a cabal of leaders whose goal from day one was undoing the Constitution and establishing the presidency as a kind of dictatorship.

Most of the corporate media have been unable to bring themselves to state this clearly. They edge around the issue by talking about the White House having been “misleading” or “untruthful.” And little is said about the lasting damage that has been done to the Republic and the Constitution, or about what is to be done about a still bloody war that never should have been fought in the first place.

The answer is clear. Impeachment proceedings should be initiated against both Bush and Cheney. These two arch criminals must not be permitted to leave office with their titles intact. They need to be tossed out in disgrace, and then indicted for war crimes and for crimes like perjury, conspiracy and perhaps treason.

We are already seeing the long-term damage that has been wrought. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee for president, is saying that the president’s use of the National Security Agency to spy, without any court order, on tens or hundreds of thousants, or perhaps millions of Americans, is legal, and would continue under a McCain administration. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said that he would continue Bush’s use of “signing statements” to ignore Congressional legislation that he felt impaired his Constitutional powers as president.

The nation is at a dangerous crossroad. Either Congress reasserts its authority now, via impeachment, drawing a Constitutional line in the stand in defense of Article I of the Constitution—the article that defines the power of Congress as absolute in terms of passing legisation—or it forever surrenders that role, leaving us with what can only be called a dictatorship.

We clearly cannot count on the next president, whoever that may be, to surrender powers usurped by the current one. What leader in history has willingly and voluntarily surrendered authority, after all?

Such power must be wrested back by Congress, and the only way for that to happen is impeachment—a course laid out clearly by the authors of the Constitution for just such a crisis.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Rice's Lies About Torture

dlindorff — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:00:51 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Is anyone surprised that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that the Bush/Cheney administration’s authorization of torture of captives has been consistently legal and in compliance with all treaties the US has signed, including the Geneva Conventions?

After all, she was at the meetings in the White House in 2001 at which various acts of torture, ranging from waterboarding to exposure to extreme heat and cold, to enforced long periods in stress positions, and to treatments which have not been disclosed (no doubt because they are so outrageous and offensive to common decency) were dreamed up, proposed and approved for use—meetings that were manifestly criminal in nature and in violation of international and US law.

The US was “a different place” in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, Rice told a group of people at a town hall meeting in Mountain View, Calif. on Thursday. But even though the administration’s “top priority” at the time was allegedly “preventing new attacks and not necessarily observing fine legal points,” the woman who at that time was Bush’s National Security Advisor, says “President Bush made clear that we were going to live up to our obligations at home and to our treaty obligations abroad."

Well of course she’d say that. But in fact, let’s look at those “fine legal points.”
The Third Geneva Convention Relating to the Treatment of Prisoners of War defines prohibited torture as follows:

“No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”

It’s kind of hard to see how that rather thorough definition of torture—which as a treaty signatory is the definition by which the US is supposed to live—can accommodate the waterboarding, sexual humiliation, months in solitary confinement, faked executions, days in stress positions, etc. which were approved by Rice and her fellow inquisitors and the nation’s commander in chief.

But no matter. Rice says that even if things were kind of harsh back in 201 and 2002, today “the ground is different.” She says soothingly, "We now have in place a law that was not there in 2002 and 2003."

Well, actually no. Because when that new law was put in place by Congress, the president issued a signing statement saying that he would not be bound by it. Asserting a claim of “unitary executive,” created out of thin air by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John You and Assistant Attorney General (and now federal appeals court judge) Jay Bybee, Bush has claimed that for the duration of the so-called “War on Terror” he has all the powers of the executive, legislative and judicial branches rolled into his own hands, and as such is not bound by acts of Congress, or by orders of the court. (Yoo and Bybee are also the mob attorneys who advised Bush that any interrogation methods that fell short of causing death or “pain equivalent to death or organ failure” would not be torture.)

The truth is that the Bush/Cheney administration, with the clear knowledge and authority of the president and vice president and of Rice herself, went on to torture captives in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo Bay, and in countless “black sites” around the globe, well into 2006 at least, and continues to torture captives now. Those tortured have even included children.

Condi Rice seems to be hoping to return to Stanford University after she leaves office at the end of this benighted and criminal administration this coming January. If she does, she will, I am sure, have to at some point confront my colleague Barbara Olshansky, who has just spent her first year there at the Stanford Law School as a professor of international human rights. Barbara, who co-authored “The Case for Impeachment” with me (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), was for several years the lead attorney for several hundred of the detainees at Guantanamo, and has also looked into the conditions under which US prisoners are being held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan—another torture center that got its start down that road with the capture and torture of John Lindh back in October, 2001—the first documented case of such abuse.

One would hope that the students of Stanford would raise such a stink about having a war criminal like Rice running their school that they would either prevent her from getting the job, or drive her from the campus.

Until then, the least we can do is make her explain how waterboarding and other measures applied under her guidance and with her approval as National Security Advisor, can possibly comply with the Geneva Conventions which the US has signed.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). He is working on a new book on the reason’s for indicting Bush and Cheney for war crimes after they leave office. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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