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Vile, Filthy, Bloody, Dirty Wars
Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, has a new book that should be required reading for Congress members, journalists, war supporters, war opponents, Americans, non-Americans -- really, pretty much everybody. The new book is called Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.
Of course, Scahill is not suggesting that the world should be a battlefield. He's reporting on how the Bush and Obama White Houses have defined and treated it as such.
The phrase "dirty wars" is a little less clear in meaning. Scahill is a reporter whose chronological narrative is gripping and revealing but virtually commentary-free. Any observations on the facts related tend to come in the form of quotations from experts and those involved. So, there isn't anywhere in the book that explicitly explains what a dirty war is.
The focus of the book is on operations that were once more secretive than they are today: kidnapping, rendition, secret-imprisonment, torture, and assassination. "This is a story," reads the first sentence of the book, "about how the United States came to embrace assassination as a central part of its national security policy." It's a story about special, elite, and mercenary forces operating under even less Congressional or public oversight than the rest of the U.S. military, a story about the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA, and not about the "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad or the activities of tens of thousands of soldiers occupying Iraq or Afghanistan.
The type of war recounted is variously identified in the book as dirty, dark, black, dark-side, small, covert, black-ops, asymmetric, secret, twilight, and -- in quotation marks -- "smart." At one point, Scahill describes the White House, along with General Stanley McChrystal, as beginning to "apply its emerging global kill list doctrine inside Afghanistan, buried within the larger, public war involving conventional U.S. forces." But part of Scahill's story is how, in recent years, something that had been considered special, secretive, and relatively unimportant has come to occupy the focus of the U.S. military. In the process, it has lost some of its stigma as well as its secretiveness. Scahill refers to some operations as "not so covert." It's hard to hide a drone war that is killing people by the thousands. Secret death squad night raids that are bragged about in front of the White House Press Corps are not so secret.
Email this Blog entryJoin Me at Great Events in DC, Dallas, Syracuse, Asheville
I'll be speaking at these events and hope to see you there:
April 20 Washington, DC, Nation Magazine Discussion Group on Iraq 3-5:30 at 3310 Connecticut Ave.
April 25 Dallas TX
April 27 Syracuse NY
Stopping the Billionaires, the Bombers, and the War Machine--an interview with David Swanson
By T. Forsyth, Rochester Indymedia
On April 11, 2013, Rochester Indymedia interviewed anti-war organizer, journalist, and blogger David Swanson who will be going to Syracuse, NY on April 26-28th for the “Resisting Drones, Global War and Empire" convergence. (See the FaceBook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/540569232649914/?ref=22.) David runs the website David Swanson dot org and writes, in a coalition effort, on War Is A Crime dot org. Currently, he works for Roots Action dot org and Veterans For Peace.
In this interview, David talks about his entry into the peace movement, the abolition of war, the sequester, and North Korea, among other topics.
Either we're gonna stop investing in billionaires, bombers, and the war machine, and start investing in people or we're headed for absolute disaster, be it climate disaster, nuclear disaster, or other military and economic and environmental collapse. We have to change course.
Watch now!
For more about the upcoming, anti-drone "Resisting Drones, Global War and Empire" convergence in Syracuse, NY, please go to Upstate Drone Action dot org.
Talk Nation Radio: Honduras Most Dangerous Country in World Thanks to Us
Tom Loudon is the co-director of the Friendship Office of the Americas and former executive secretary of the Commission of Truth in Honduras. He says that following the 2009 coup Honduras has spiraled into becoming the most dangerous country on earth, with much of the violence funded by the U.S. State Department, and with that Department clearly being less than forthcoming with the U.S. Congress or the public.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download or get embed code from Archive or AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free and complete at
http://davidswanson.org/talknationradio
Vieques 10 Years After the Bombing Stopped
By Helen Jaccard and David Swanson, http://warisacrime.org/vieques
Ten years ago May 1, the people of Vieques, Puerto Rico and their supporters from around the world defeated the most powerful military machine ever, through mass civil disobedience and without firing a single shot. On May 1, 2003 the bombing stopped and the bases were officially closed. People from all over the world supported the struggle on Vieques, and the activists and residents have an incredible victory to celebrate.
There were decades of resistance, civil disobedience and arrests. But those hoping and laying the groundwork for greater resistance were given an opportunity on April 19, 1999, when a U.S. Marines pilot missed his target and killed civilian security guard David Sanes Rodriguez. That spark lit a fire of nonviolent resistance that brought together Viequenses, Puerto Ricans, and supporters from the United States and around the world. A campaign of non-violent civil resistance that began in 1999 lasted four years, including a year-long occupation of the bombing range, and saw over 1,500 people arrested. The Navy was forced to close the bombing range on May 1, 2003. Peace loving people had won most of the first of their demands for the island: demilitarization.
A huge commemoration is planned in Vieques for the anniversary from May 1 – 4, 2013.
Beautiful Vieques island is only 21 miles across and 5 miles wide, and 7 miles from the main island of Puerto Rico. It is home to about 9,300 people, as well as endangered turtle species, rare Caribbean plants and animals, bio-luminescent bays, and miles of what look like unspoiled beaches.
But crabs with three claws, grossly deformed fish laden with heavy metals, once-beautiful coral reefs, and beaches and seas that have been decimated by military activity tell a story of environmental disaster with huge health impacts on people, plants, and animals.
An incredible three-quarters of the island was appropriated in the 1940s and used by the U.S. Navy for bombing practice, war games, and dumping or burning old munitions. This was a terrible attack on an island municipality, one the United States was not at war with.
Now, Vieques Island, a paradise in trouble, is one of the largest superfund sites in the United States, together with its little sister island of Culebra, which took the brunt of the bombing until 1973, when the Culebra bombing range closed (also due to protests) and the bombing practice was transferred to Vieques.
In 2003, the Navy did not return the land to the people, but transferred its Vieques land to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which operates beaches that were never used for military activities.
Viequenses fear that keeping the U.S. Government in control of their lands could result in future re-militarization of the island. Residents aren't happy that their land has not been returned to them and that they are fined for staying on their land past sunset or collecting crabs -- a mainstay of their historic diet. There are also two military occupations of lands -- a ROTHR radar system and a communications area, and the people want these closed as well. You can add your name to Viequenses' demand for peace here. 
For over 2,000 years people known as Taino inhabited Vieques, which they called Bieque. The Taino found and left behind them a paradise of fertile soil, fresh water, and trees. In 1493, the conquistadors arrived. In 1524, the Spanish killed every remaining resident. Vieques was then left uninhabited by humanity for 300 years, interrupted by a few British, French, and Spanish attempts to set up forts or destroy each other's efforts.
From 1823 into the 1900s, Vieques was used by the Spanish and French to grow sugar. English-speaking people of African origin, from nearby islands, were kept in slavery or the nearest thing to it, and forced to grow the sugar cane. They revolted in 1864 and 1874, and in the 1915 Sugar Strike. The United States took Puerto Rico from the Spanish in 1898 and made residents U.S. citizens in 1917. The depression of the 1930s, together with two hurricanes in 1932, brought on harder times than ever.
In 1939 the United States bought 26,000 of the 30,000 acres of land on Vieques from big sugar plantation owners. Living on that land were 10,000 to 12,000 workers who also raised crops to feed themselves. The U.S. Navy gave families $30 and one day's notice before bulldozing houses. Most people were left without means of subsistence, but many stubbornly refused to leave the island.
Carlos Prieta Ventura, a 51-year-old Viequense fisherman, says his father was 8-years-old in 1941 when the Navy told his family their house would be bulldozed whether or not they accepted the $30. Ventura says he has always resisted the Navy's efforts to force people off the island.
From 1941 to 2003, the U.S. military flew planes from aircraft carriers based on the main island of Puerto Rico dropping bombs over Vieques. Bombs "rained down," and you could feel the ground shake within the base, as one U.S. veteran told CNN. Bombs fell at all hours, all day, all week, all year, amounting to approximately a trillion tons of ordnance, much of which (some 100,000 items) lies unexploded on land and in the sea. Vieques was systematically poisoned by heavy metals, napalm, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, and who knows what all else that the Navy has not announced publicly -- having falsely denied using depleted uranium before finally admitting to it, and having dumped barrels of unknown toxic substances into the clear blue Caribbean.
The arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, and aluminum in the bombs are also found in hair samples of 80% of the people living on Vieques, who suffer at far higher rates than on the main island (and possibly anywhere else on earth) from cancer (30% higher than Puerto Rico), cirrhosis of the liver, kidney failure, hypertension (381%), diabetes (41%), birth defects, stillbirths, and miscarriages.
The impact of the U.S. occupation that began in 1941 was felt far more swiftly than cancer. According to Ventura, some 15,000 troops were routinely set loose on Vieques looking for booze and women. Women were dragged out of their homes and gang raped. A boy was killed by gang rape. Ventura says people had only a machete and a hole in the wall by the door where they could try to stab the Marines who would come to take women. A dozen people were killed over the years directly by the U.S. weapons testing. And the Navy banned fishermen from various areas, advising them to try food stamps instead. Fishermen attempted civil resistance actions, and many were arrested during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
Lydia Ortiz, a Viequense who grew up in the small town of Esperanza, recalls the bombing: "A lot of houses had their roofs falling in and everything as a result of the vibrations from the bombs for many years. It was pretty nerve wracking because you never knew what was going to crash down in your house. We lived quite close to where the bombing was happening. When I was a child they were dropping bombs near me. In the school, you could hear the bombing. You couldn't even hear the teacher because of the noise. People were afraid to go anywhere near the base or the beach so it was very difficult for many years. It seems like just yesterday or only 5 or 6 years ago that the bombing stopped, even though it is really almost 10 years ago."
A celebration of the 10-year anniversary is indeed in order. We must remember victories as they have remarkable power to motivate others around the world.
But the Navy's presence and the environmental disaster it created continue to afflict Vieques today. The U.S. government has not cleaned up the poisons and bombs and continues to use practices that further endanger the people. There is no bomb explosion chamber on the island. The United States has disposed of what unexploded bombs it has disposed of by blowing them up, further spreading the contaminants that are killing the people of the island.
There is also no hospital on the island, few ferries to the island, few and overpriced airplanes, a handful of taxis and public vans, and very limited tourist facilities. There is no college or university, and very few jobs of any kind. Business licenses are issued in San Juan and require bribes. Viequenses' families are ravaged by cancer, but also by illiteracy, unemployment, violent crime, and teen pregnancy. All of the water -- like all electricity -- comes in a pipe from the main island. Two of the residents said that the one resort on Vieques sometimes uses all the water. Seven thousand Viequenses sued the U.S. government over their health problems, but the U.S. Supreme court refused to hear the case.
With very little land available for farming, Vieques, like all of Puerto Rico, imports almost all of its food. Some people have become so desperate that they gather old munitions to sell for a little money to someone who will melt the metal for aluminum cans. But heavy metals and depleted uranium endanger the metal gatherers and whoever later drinks from the cans.
Presidential candidate Obama wrote to the Governor of Puerto Rico in 2008: "We will closely monitor the health of the people of Vieques and promote appropriate remedies to health conditions caused by military activities conducted by the U.S. Navy on Vieques." But that promise remains unfulfilled.
Robert Rabin Siegal of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques writes in a letter to President Barack Obama,
"Although I cannot claim the Navy and military toxics caused my cancer, you don't have to be a quantum physicist to understand how decades of exposure to heavy metals in the food chain, air, water and land, combined with the socio-economic pressures from the loss of two thirds of the island’s lands, would clearly contribute to high cancer rates. The Navy dropped radioactive uranium projectiles here, we believe, in large quantities, in preparation for military actions in the Balkans and the Middle East. The list of dangerous chemical components from munitions dropped on Vieques is extensive, as is the number of illnesses they cause.
"Mr. President: you received the Nobel Peace Prize; we demand peace for Vieques. An island and people used to protect U.S. interests since WWII, forced to sacrifice its land, economic prosperity, tranquility and health, deserves at least the hope of peace for this and future generations."
". . . A handful of powerful US based corporations have pocketed most of the more than 200 million dollars spent on clean-up over the past decade. We urge you to order technology transference to promote the creation of Puerto Rican and Viequense companies to carry out the clean-up of Vieques, thereby transforming that process into part of the economic reconstruction of the island as well as assuring community confidence in this crucial element in the healing of Vieques."
People anywhere in the world can take one minute to sign a petition to the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House in support of justice, at long last, for Vieques:
"I join the people of Vieques in demanding:
"Health Care -- Provide a modern hospital with cancer treatment facilities, early screening and timely treatment for all diseases. Create a research facility to determine the relationship between military toxins and health. Provide just compensation to people suffering poor health as a result of the Navy's activities.
"Cleanup -- Fund a complete, rapid cleanup of the land and surrounding waters, still littered by thousands of bombs, grenades, napalm, Agent Orange, depleted uranium and other explosives left by the Navy. Cease the ongoing open detonation of unexploded ordnance. Guarantee community participation in the cleanup; train Viequenses as managers, administrators, and scientists, and foster Viequense companies to do the work.
"Sustainable Development -- Support the Master Plan for Sustainable Development of Vieques which promotes agriculture, fishing, eco-tourism, small guest houses, housing, collective transportation, archaeology, and historic and environmental research, among other things.
"Demilitarization and Return of the Land -- Close the remaining military installations still occupying 200 acres of Vieques. Return to the people of Vieques all land still under the control of the U.S. Navy and the federal government."
For extensive documentation, see the attachments at the bottom of http://warisacrime.org/vieques and others at this link.
Helen Jaccard is Chair of the Veterans For Peace -- Environmental Cost of War and Militarism Working Group. She spent October, 2012 in Vieques doing research about the environmental and health effects of the military activities. Her previous article about Sardinia, Italy can be found at http://www.warisacrime.org/
David Swanson's books include "War Is A Lie." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio.
People and Peace Over Plutocracy
Remarks for conference on Building Bridges and Creating the Beloved Community, April 13, 2013
Sponsored by Maryland United for Peace and Justice, http://www.mupj.org
By David Swanson
Several years ago a bunch of peace activists were eating in a restaurant in Crawford, Texas, and we noticed George W. Bush. He was actually a cardboard version of George W. Bush like you might get your photo with in front of the White House, but he was almost as lifelike as the real thing. We picked him up and stood him in the corner of the restaurant, facing the corner. We asked him to stay there until he understood what he'd done wrong. For all I know he's still standing there.
Of course, a piece of cardboard wasn't going to really understand what it had done wrong, and the real president probably wouldn't have either. The benefit of standing him in the corner, if there was one, was for everybody else in the restaurant. And the benefit of impeaching or prosecuting Bush for his crimes and abuses would have been, and still would be, for the world -- not for him and not for those who are angry at him. We shouldn't imagine that vengeance would be very satisfying. Not when you punish a man. And not when that man destroys the nation of Iraq. Wishing others ill does ill to yourself. It cannot be truly satisfying.
Twelve days from now I'll be down in Dallas for the dedication of the Bush Library, or rather the Bush Lie Bury, a half-billion-dollar project aimed at burying lies. We'll be there to unearth what should not be forgotten.
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Now, I'm not so simple-minded as to believe that Bush ran the entire country on his own. I know how Dick Cheney manipulated him. I know that if people wanted to protest Cheney's disastrous role they could find him living near here at 1126 Chain Bridge Road in McLean, Virginia, as well as 7879 Fuller Road in St. Michael's, Maryland. Not that I would ever, ever recommend holding massive noisy protests at either of those homes.
I also realize that there's a permanent military-industrial-corporate-bankster complex. I know the Democrats controlled the Senate that voted for the war on Iraq. I know the corporate media spoon-fed the war lies to my friends and neighbors. But we should be holding all of these parties accountable, not excusing the man who was seated in virtually a royal throne just because he had a lot of help and encountered a massive outpouring of obedience.
When we tried to impeach Bush, people accused us of being cruel and vengeful. I denied it. I said that I was concerned about precedents being set for the future. But the fact is that a lot of people in the movement enjoyed being cruel and vengeful, and at moments I did too. It's great fun to point to a leader as the embodiment of evil policies. It humanizes structural wrongs.
We are actually up against the very same interlocking evils that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said we were up against when he spoke at Riverside Church 46 years ago last week. We're facing militarism, racism, and extreme materialism. But how do you take those and stand them in the corner? How do you mock their funny accent or their bad grammar? How do you throw your shoes at them?
We had a lot of fun denouncing Bush as an idiot and a liar. We had so much fun that we forgot he was an idiot when we were calling him a liar. Don't get me wrong: he knew perfectly well that he was lying. That's been completely established. This is a man who told Tony Blair he'd like to paint an airplane with a U.N. logo, fly it low over Iraq, get it shot at, and thereby start a war. This is a man who moments later walked out, together with Tony Blair, to the White House Press Corpse and declared his intention to avoid war if at all possible. This is a man who was asked after the invasion why he'd made the claims he made about weapons, and who replied, "What's the difference?"
But here's what I do mean to say: every leader who launches or continues a war does so using lies. Always. Without exception. But some of them tell their lies better than an idiot. Some of them don't pick obvious lies or lies that can be swiftly exposed by events.
Not everyone caught onto this. Some opposed the war on Iraq without opposing the war machine that generates new wars. Some even started calling Iraq the bad war and Afghanistan the good war, as if there can be a good war. Some imagined that because Iraq was based on lies and launched against the will of the United Nations, Afghanistan must have been based on truth and launched with a U.N. authorization. That was not the case. The U.N. approved of the occupation of Afghanistan two-months into it. That's how conquest has worked for millennia. Treaties and courts had been in place to pursue the prosecution of alleged 9-11 terrorists, and the Afghan government was open to such arrangements. Attacking the people of Afghanistan was not self-defense or moral or legal in any way, not even under the U.N. Charter, much less some of the stronger laws that we generally choose to ignore.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, for example, bans all war. It is the product of a peace movement of our great grandparents that sought the elimination of war and has much to teach us.
We ought to have opposed the war on Iraq because it killed people. There's no better reason. But then we would have had to oppose all wars. They all kill people. It sounds so much more REASONABLE to oppose particular wars. Half of our neighbors work in the war industry. What about their jobs? North Korea may attack us at any moment. There are evil people in the world who want to kill us. Our government is pursuing economic and military policies that are sure to make them really, really want to kill us. Surely we can't oppose all war.
Well then, we needed to find a different reason to oppose the war on Iraq. And we found lots. And they were all bad ones. I'll give you four examples.
1. The war on Iraq was bad because Iraq had no weapons. What's wrong with that? Well, it implies that nations that do have weapons should be bombed. That would include our nation, by the way, above all others. But -- more immediately -- it would include Iran, which is being falsely accused of having weapons exactly as if that is grounds for bombing that country.
2. The war on Iraq was bad because Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. This implies that if the government of Afghanistan had anything to do with even indirectly supporting anyone involved in 9-11, then the people of Afghanistan -- most of whom had never heard of 9-11 and still haven't -- should be bombed. The same logic is costing drone strike victims their lives by the thousands.
3. The war on Iraq was bad because it wasn't being won. This of course contributed to escalating the war in hopes of winning it, whatever that would have meant.
4. The war on Iraq was bad because it was a Republican Party war. This wasn't entirely true. It was also a position destined to create support for wars whenever a Democrat moved into the White House.
The argument for opposing little bits of militarism rather than the whole thing is that more people are likely to quickly join you. If you appeal to their patriotism or partisanship or religion or militarism but nudge them toward opposing one particular war for some tangential reason, well then maybe they'll be ever so slightly more likely to oppose the next war and the next war. I don't accept that argument.
For one thing, ill-informed as I think people are, I don't think they're stupid enough not to notice when I'm telling the truth and when I'm not -- when I'm actually making up excuses for a position that I hold for a different reason. I actually want wars ended because they kill people. If I claim to oppose just the Iraq War but not the Afghanistan War, what happens when the Iraq War ends and I shift to opposing the Afghanistan War? Who will take me seriously?
Also, if we don't tell the truth then people never find out how bad the wars are. But if they do find out how bad the wars are, then they oppose them along with us for all the right reasons, reasons that carry over to counter-recruitment and conversion -- that is, to keeping our kids from becoming cannon-fodder and converting our war industries to peace industries, which -- by the way -- produces more and better paying jobs for the same investment, not to mention greater happiness with one's career.
It's not easy to tell people how our wars really look while telling them that you support the troops and want to see wars waged with better strategies. Our wars are one-sided slaughters. U.S. deaths in Iraq were 0.3% of the deaths. Iraq lost a greater number of people and a greater percentage of its people than the U.S. lost in its civil war or World War II, or than Japan or France or England lost in World War II. Iraq lost millions of refugees, its education system, its health system, its entire society. The nation was destroyed. And a majority of Americans believe Iraq benefitted from the war while the United States suffered. We were happy year after year to see a majority of Americans say they wanted the war ended, but many of them were saying they wanted an act of generosity ended, not the war as it actually existed.
The trillions of dollars spent destroying Iraq and not rebuilding it could have been put to other uses. It could have eliminated world hunger. It could have saved many times the lives it was used to kill. But that would require real generosity, not just frustration that a war wasn't being managed well.
I was involved in working hard to make sure people knew Bush lied about Iraq. I'm pleased that a slim majority still says it knows that. I don't know how long that will last. But an overwhelming majority still believes some other war could be a good war.
Sitting on a train recently, I spoke to a young woman who told me she was studying dentistry and would be in the Air Force. Couldn't she be a dentist without the military, I asked? No, she answered, not without $200,000 in debt. Yes, I replied, but without the Air Force, we could have free colleges and no debts. No, she replied . . .
And, if you think for a moment, I know you'll know what she said next. It had nothing to do with the lies about Iraq, the financial cost of Iraq, the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq, or what war mongers the Republicans are. It had nothing to do with any of that. Think for a second, and you'll know.
Any guesses?
She replied: if we didn't have the Air Force, North Korea would kill us.
Now, if you have a little education you probably realize that North Korea spends less than 1% of what the United States does on war preparations, that North Korea couldn't attack the United States without being completely obliterated, and that any nation on earth would scream angry threats if we pretended to drop nuclear bombs on it after having destroyed all of its cities, killed millions of its people, and threatened and antagonized it for over half a century through control of the military belonging to its former other half.
But if you'd just learned that the war on Iraq was a dumb war that cost too much, that nothing is more heroic than militarism, that even the peace movement should be led by soldiers, and that waving flags and valuing a particular 5% of humanity to a special degree are admirable values, where would you be?
There will always, always, always be another North Korea that's supposedly about to kill us. We don't need rapid-response fact corrections. We need citizens with some understanding of history, with knowledge of the Other 95%, with the capacity to resist terrorism-by-television, and capable of independent thought. To get there, we need a peace movement that moves us, at whatever pace it can, toward peace -- toward the popular demand for the absolute abolition of all war. And to get there we need to stop behaving like politicians.
Legislators have to compromise, and would have to compromise even if our government weren't so corrupted by money. We don't. Our unions and activist groups didn't have to ban the words "single payer" from rallies for the so-called "public option," thus pre-compromising and predictably ending up with nothing. We can let Congress do the compromising, but it will do it from where we begin. If we begin with self-censorship, we lose.
When Bill McKibben picks Bernie Sanders as his model, he's picking one of our better legislators. He shouldn't be picking any of them as a model for activism. Instead he should be looking to leaders of our civil rights movement, women's rights movement, labor, peace, and justice movements. He should be looking to activist models in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe.
Activists' work is to speak the truth and nonviolently move the nation. Loyalty to political parties and officials is misplaced. Elections are relatively unimportant. We need teach-ins, sit-ins, boycotts, protests, marches, and direct actions and artwork and education of every variety. We have so much to do that elections ought not to be sitting anywhere near the top of the list, much less distracting people with something bordering on obsession.
I must have received emails from a dozen large organizations this week on the topic of Social Security with the message "This isn't what we voted for." They meant to say "This isn't what we want." They may have even meant to say "This isn't something we'll stand for." But they did vote for it in voting for President Barack Obama. We knew he would try to cut Social Security and now he's trying to. You may believe that backing some other candidate wouldn't have stopped him or would have been worse. But we have to recognize a certain incompleteness in a strategy that says, "We will vote for you no matter what, and please end the war and don't build the pipeline and don't pursue NAFTA on steroids in the Pacific and don't cut Social Security and don't prosecute whistleblowers and don't go through a list of men, women, and children every Tuesday and pick which ones to have murdered." Even when that strategy shifts to saying, "We voted for you and now we would really like you to end that war and stop building that pipeline and break off the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations and take back your proposal on Social Security and Medicare and free Bradley Manning and abandon the kill list and ground the drones," there's still something notably incomplete, at the very least, in such an approach.
President Obama has not killed the same number of people President Bush did. And President Bush gets some of the blame for having expanded the powers that Obama now abuses. But Obama has expanded those powers further still, and he too must take some of the blame for what all future president do now.
I helped draft about 70 articles of impeachment against Bush, from which Congressman Dennis Kucinich selected 35 and introduced them. I later looked through those 35 and found 27 that applied to President Obama, even though his own innovations in abusive behavior weren't on the list. Bush's lying Congress into war (not that Congress wasn't eager to play along) is actually a standard to aspire to now. When Obama went to war in Libya, against the will of Congress, he avoided even bothering to involve the first branch of our government.
When Bush locked people up or tortured them to death, he kept it as secret as he could. Obama -- despite radically expanding secrecy powers and persecuting whistleblowers -- does most of his wrongdoing wide out in the open. Warrantless spying is openly acknowledged policy. Imprisonment without trial is so-called law. Torture is a policy choice, and the choice these days is to outsource it. Murder is, however, the new torture. The CIA calls it "cleaner." And Americans tell pollsters that they oppose killing U.S. citizens but support killing non-U.S. citizens. And activists begin to focus on the danger to U.S. citizens, as if that were the strategic way to generate opposition.
President Obama runs through a list of men, women, and children to murder on Tuesdays, picks some, and has them murdered. We don't know this because of a whistleblower or a journalist. We know this because the White House wanted us to know it, and to know it before the election. Think about that. We moved from the pre-insanity state we were in circa 1999 to an age in which presidents want us to know they murder people. That was primarily the work of George W. Bush, and every single person who yawned, who looked away, who cheered, who was too busy, who said "it's more important to elect a new president than to keep presidential powers in check," or who said "impeachment would be traumatic" -- as if this isn't.
The war in Afghanistan is twice the size it was when Obama arrived, and we talk about it as if it's ending, even though they tell us it will continue for longer than most wars have taken from beginning to end. Military spending has risen in the Obama years. Foreign bases have expanded. The CIA has been given war making powers (and is being regularly protested just next door to Dick Cheney's house mentioned earlier). Special forces are operating in more countries. A new form of war, waged with drones, has been taken into new nations without any say from Congress or the U.N. or we the people. The Pentagon is moving into Africa in a major way.
And when we spend a trillion dollars a year on war preparations through various government departments, it's a banker bailout we never get back. Inequality of wealth in this country has been growing under Obama even faster than under Bush. The super-profitable, super-corrupt, and super-unaccountable war industry is part of the reason why. Any one of the 10 richest people in this country could set aside his income for one year and buy housing for every person who doesn't have housing. The poorest 47% of Americans own less than nothing. The poorest 62% of Americans own less than the richest 400 people. Only three nations on earth are more unequal than the land of the free and home of the suckered. The Wall Street crash reduced median wealth 66% for Latinos and 53% for African Americans. Dr. King said if we continued to spend more on war than on programs of social uplift we would approach spiritual death. The question now, these many years and wars later, is whether we can manage spiritual resurrection.
To do so, we'll need unity. We can't lack understanding for the student who goes into the military in order to become a dentist. We must appreciate the economic bind that we've all been put in. But that doesn't mean its wise to oppose cuts to Social Security by hyping the supposed "service" that veterans have done for us in wars. For one thing, just stop and consider where all the money is going that could lower the retirement age rather than increasing it. It's going to billionaires and the war machine. Glorifying the war machine is not a smart way to change that.
President Kennedy once wrote that war would continue until the conscientious objector had the prestige and honor that the soldier has now. Of course, soldiers would have to lose prestige as conscientious objectors and other resisters gain. The two cannot be honorable together. But opposing participation in the military is not the same thing as condemning any person who has done it. Most do it for economic, among other, reasons. I'm proud to be an associate (non-veteran) member of Veterans For Peace.
We also must separate the sin from the sinner when we consider employment in the weapons industry. When Congress funds a war machine that builds momentum for war, and does so for the stated reason of creating jobs, that's sociopathic. When someone with a family to feed takes one of those jobs, that's often a matter of survival. When the state of Maryland, even while banning the death penalty, forces Montgomery County to give millions of dollars to Lockheed Martin, that's pure corruption. But Lockheed's employees can't be expected to all just quit without alternative employment.
Our goal should be economic conversion from making weapons to making windmills and every other useful product. Bills to begin coordinating this at the national level made progress in Congress from the 60s through the 80s but haven't been heard of in recent years. One opportunity to begin this at the local level is anywhere that war jobs are actually lost during the much exaggerated current cuts, if any. Localities and states are starting to create commissions to lobby for more war money. Instead they should be studying the advantages of conversion.
The advantages include: more and better paying jobs, significantly so according to a study from the University of Massachusetts. The labor movement, which has been rather weak on opposing wars for many years in this country, should be opposing war spending even for purely economic reasons. Even tax cuts for working people produces more jobs than military spending. The only way you can cut military spending and get fewer jobs is if you give the money to that crowd we call the Job Creators.
Another advantage is, of course, safety. The Department of Defense endangers us. De-funding it is in fact in the interests of what they call national security. But there are many more advantages.
Civil liberties groups have done heroic work in this country in recent years opposing warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment, torture, assassination, and other atrocities generated by military spending. These groups ought to heed President Eisenhower's warning and oppose the root of the problem. Some of them are not just refraining from opposing war spending. They're actually supporting wars, even while opposing various evils that wars involve. We need to work on this with people concerned about civil liberties. When we recently passed a resolution against drones in Charlottesville, Va., it opened up a discussion about drone use abroad as well. I recommend that. I'll be glad to talk with you about how to do it. Also please be at the U.S. Senate hearing on drones a week from Tuesday morning if you can.
The School of the Americas Watch has not shut down the school, but has persuaded various nations to stop sending students to be trained in torture and murder at Fort Benning, Georgia. Sometimes our best allies are abroad. Powerful movements against U.S. military bases in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Italy, and elsewhere need our help, as we need theirs.
The torture techniques used by our death squads and proxies abroad are also developed in U.S. prisons. We lead the world in weapons sales, war spending, and incarceration. And these are connected. Taking on the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex together is the most likely way for us to take on militarism, racism, and extreme materialism without dividing our strength.
Gun control should be holistic and international. While the NRA and the White House debate local gun restrictions, they join hands to oppose international ones. But selling weapons to the world, against some of which U.S. soldiers will certainly later fight, spreads the idea of righteous violence. Peace activists should work for gun control at home, but should take the opportunity to make people more aware of U.S. weapons sales abroad, and the kinds of governments those weapons are sold to.
Fox News' Sean Hannity says it's OK for basketball coaches to hit players because, "My father hit me with a belt and I turned out OK." I suppose we can each judge for ourselves how he turned out. Violence in any aspect of our lives can help to legitimate it in others. Hannity has not distinguished himself as an opponent of wars.
Environmental groups have largely, but not entirely, shied away from opposing our greatest consumer of oil, a machine that fights wars for oil and uses the oil to fight wars, poisoning our nation and others with chemicals and radiation to an extent that would rank such abuses above 9/11 or Pearl Harbor if foreigners were responsible. The anti-bases movement is slowly making connections, as in Jeju Island, South Korea, between environmental activism and peace activism. Such alliances can only make us stronger.
Immigrants rights can sometimes be thought of as "refugee rights." Little produces immigration the way wars do. And denying rights to people whose country your own military has ravaged is beyond the rudeness of most people, once made aware of it. Immigrants rights and peace are causes that must unite.
Education and housing and green energy infrastructure advocates, advocates for all good programs, have two possible sources of funding. We can tax the plutocrats. Or we can scale back a war machine currently as large as the rest of the world's combined. Practically speaking, we'll have to do both. The war machine generates plutocrats, and vice versa. About half of our tax dollars on Monday will go to war funding. There are funds that you can put that money into instead, an approach that some of you might want to investigate.
The Pentagon just announced that it went $10 billion over budget on killing children in Afghanistan. Oops. Meanwhile, Congress has manufactured the pretense that the U.S. Postal Service is billions of dollars in the hole. We are a nation that can afford services we don't dare imagine, and our government still hopes to privatize the post office. Instead of having no mail on Saturdays, I, for one, would prefer to wars on Saturdays.
The Military Industrial Complex is everything Eisenhower feared, and then some. But if every interest group and individual for whom it is a major stumbling block were to unite against it, and in favor of conversion to a peace economy, the Pentagon's walls would come crumbling down. Opposing militarism is not a separate little campaign, but ought to be part of a comprehensive plan for justice. Instead of shouting "Jobs Not Cuts," we should be demanding cuts to the military and to highways and to banks and to corporate welfare, and expanded investment in all the things we want and the things we don't dare dream of but can easily afford.
By direct democracy, Americans would reduce military spending right now. No persuasion is needed. But a movement of dedicated activists intent on enacting a major conversion program will require stronger and deeper public opinion than now exists.
We're up against belief in the possibility of a good war, and myths about past wars being good and just. We have to correct those myths and point out the altered state of the world that makes them unhelpful anyway. Weaponry, communications, and understanding of the tools of nonviolence have changed. War is no longer useful, even if you imagine it ever was. What we need is a movement for the abolition of war, and one place to look for inspiration might be to the original abolitionists, to Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano, and those who launched a movement that built pressure to end the British slave trade and slavery -- a movement that gained, of course, from rebellions by those enslaved in Jamaica and what we now call Haiti.
If you're like me, there are some things you would like to abolish. My list includes weapons, fossil fuel use, plutocracy, corporate personhood, corporate nationhood, health insurance corporations, poverty wages, poverty, homelessness, factory farming, prisons, the drug war, the death penalty, nuclear energy, the U.S. Senate, the electoral college, gerrymandering, electronic voting machines, murder, rape, child abuse, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post. I could go on. I bet you can think of at least one institution you believe we'd be better off without. I put war around the top of the list.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries in England, activists invented committees with chapters and newsletters, posters, speaking tours, book tours, petitioning, boycotts, theatrical props, and investigative journalism. Most people couldn't vote, and voting had nothing to do with it. Slavery was the norm across the world, and activists faced defeat after defeat for many years. They didn't quit. They demanded rights -- and not for themselves, but for others unlike them and for the most part unseen by them. Britons were familiar with having their sons kidnapped and enslaved by the British navy, but they applied that understanding to others in other circumstances. We can do the same. We see disasters in New Orleans or New York. We can begin to see them in Baghdad and Kabul.
Frederick Douglass went to England to meet with Clarkson. Douglass worked for the abolition of slavery here, but later remarked, "When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act." Perhaps we too can act on behalf of others. Perhaps we can expand concern for U.S. citizens killed by drones to human beings killed by drones.
Douglass also said this: "War is among the greatest calamities incident to the lives of nations. They arrest the progress of civilization, corrupt the sources of morality, destroy all proper sense of the sacredness of human life, perpetuate the national hate, and weigh down the necks of after coming generations with the burdens of debt."
When Britain and France went to war, the anti-slavery movement stalled. When the global war on the globe started, progressive movements in the United States stalled. The idea that North Korea will kill us all aids the idea that we should cut Social Security and get started on killing ourselves. Permanent war means a permanent impediment to progress. We have the power to abolish war and to put a trillion dollars a year to better use.
"And these words shall then become," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley,
"Like Oppression's thundered doom
"Ringing through each heart and brain,
"Heard again - again - again -
"Rise like Lions after slumber
"In unvanquishable number -
"Shake your chains to earth like dew
"Which in sleep had fallen on you -
"Ye are many - they are few."
David Swanson's books include "War Is A Lie." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
Talk Nation Radio: Jody Sokolower on Teaching Wars in U.S. Schools
Jody Sokolower is the managing editor of Rethinking Schools at http://rethinkingschools.org and editor of Teaching About the Wars.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download or get embed code from Archive or AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free and complete at
http://davidswanson.org/talknationradio
Build Peace and Justice in Maryland April 12-13
Maryland United for Peace and Justice, Inc.
Bringing peace, justice, and environmental groups and individuals together since 1985.
www.mupj.org
28th Annual Maryland Peace, Justice and the Environment Conference
"Building Bridges; Creating the Beloved Community"
Dedicated to the memory of Founding Member Bert Donn and Activist Bob Auerbach
Friday and Saturday, April 12th and 13th, 2013
Turner Memorial AME Church
7201 16th Place
Hyattsville, Maryland
www.turner-ame.org
Sponsored by:
Maryland United for Peace and Justice/Institute For Positive Action
and a host of other groups, listed below
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| Purpose: The Rev. Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King’s mentor and spiritual advisor, wrote about and lived into “the Beloved Community.” This conference will consider ways in which we, as a diverse peoples, can build the bridges that can create his Beloved Community. Friday, April 12
CO-SPONSORS (at press time): Adelphi Friends Meeting We also thank the following for their generous support: Thank you all for making this conference possible! |
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Info: paulette.d.hammond@questdiagnostics.com
tonylang4peace@gmail.com
or
410.747.3811 (Paulette)
301.390.9684 (Tony)
