The Neocons Had Deliberately Gamed the System

Posted on March 24, 2008 by RagBlog

From Juan Cole’s Informed Comment. This demonstrates the depth of criminality centred in the White House and highest levels of the BushCo administration. It is beyond me how we do nothing in the face of such contempt for the law and the people.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog


Unger: The Iraq War was a Conspiracy

Craig Unger’s email, part of an interchange on a private discussion group, is reprinted here with permission:

[A critic, let us call him X, objected] to Jim Lobe’s suggestion that Iraqi WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda had nothing to do with starting the Iraq War. But Lobe is right. X is off base when he says nothing “suggests anything other than they believed Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs.”

As my recent book, The Fall of the House of Bush–which owes a debt to Lobe’s fine reporting on the neocons) shows in great detail, Cheney and the neocons effectively created an alternative national security apparatus to circumvent, sabotage and subvert the $40 billion a year that the nation spends on intelligence and to disseminate false intelligence about Saddam that would create a basis for war.

To be specific, let’s take the Niger documents that falsely asserted that Saddam had agreed to buy 500 tons of yellowcake from the Republic of Niger. Many unanswered questions remain about the origin of the documents. But no one contests that they were forgeries that were based on documents stolen from the Niger Embassy in Rome over New Year’s Eve in 2000.

I traveled to Rome to investigate the fabrication and dissemination of the documents, and, as I report in my book, I found that both the documents themselves and the information in them were distributed by right wing elements of Italian intelligence and the neocons in a deliberate manner to make it appear as if there were multiple independent sources corroborating one another, when in fact the only source were the original phony documents.

When the White House wanted to use the documents to build the case for war in an October 2002 speech Bush gave in Cincinnati, the CIA intervened twice to say the information was not reliable.

As I also show in my book, these documents and/or the information in them were discredited by Western authorities(including the CIA and the State Department) on at least fourteen such occasions before Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address

But none of that stopped Bush from citing this information–or, rather, disinformation– as a casus belli in his famous sixteen words in his 2003 SOTU Address. [ Col. Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell, told me, if he took something out of Colin Powell’s UN speech 47 times, the neocons would put in 48.]

X seems to suggest that all this could have been the result of mere ineptitude. However, I cite, on the record, no fewer than nine former officials in the military and intelligence worlds who characterize the Niger document episode as black propaganda or part of a disinformation campaign that was intentionally done to mislead the American people into supporting a war.

Likewise, one has only to talk to Tyler Drumheller, the former head of European operations for the CIA, who has recounted at great length how he vetted “Curveball,” the prized Iraqi exile who spun phony yarns about mobile weapons vans, and told his superiors again and again and again that Curveball could not be trusted. Yet George Tenet, under pressure from the White House and the neocons, ignored him. As a result, Colin Powell told the world about the phony mobile weapons vans.

One could go on at great length with many other examples(as I do in my book). But the point is, the neocons had deliberately gamed the system. As their policy papers show, they knew they wanted to start the war long before the administration took office and in order to do so they knew they had to control intelligence. That’s why Wolfowitz, Perle, and Eliot Abrams began making semi-secret trips to Austin as early as 1998 to convince Bush that an invasion was necessary. That’s why, in December 2000, they tried to put Wolfowitz in as head of the CIA. And that’s why, when that didn’t work, they moved him to the Pentagon where he oversaw the creation of the Office of Special Plans which was in charge of putting out phony intelligence.

Likewise, Cheney put John Bolton in at State to keep an eye on Colin Powell and to make sure that State Department analysts at INR( who had repeatedly discovered the errors in the phony neocon intelligence) were kept out of all the key meetings. As a result, Colin Powell made his presentation to the UN based on intel that came from the neocons in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon–not the professionals at Langley and at [the State Department’s intelligence analysis branch,] INR.

In other words, we went to war not because of intelligence failures, as X seems to think, but because of intelligence successes–successful black propaganda operations, successful disinformation operations–that were deliberately designed to mislead the American people.

As to why, again, I believe that Jim Lobe is on the right track. One has only to read the various neocon policy papers dating back to the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance papers(aka the Wolfowitz Doctrine), A Clean Break in 1996, David Wurmser’s Tyranny’s Ally in 1997, the PNAC papers of 1998, and scores of other articles to see that the neocons had been hoping to start the war for roughly a decade before it actually began. According to these papers, the chief reasons for this grand new strategy of overhauling the Middle East were regional security(ie, Israel) and to protect America’s strategic resources(ie, oil.)

Craig Unger
Vanity Fair Magazine

Go here for information about The Fall of the House of Bush and to buy the book.

Source

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Freeze!

Posted on March 24, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

CodePink’s Medea Benjamin “freezes” at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. (Photo: Thomas Good / NLN)

Stop-Action Action

By William Blum / March 23, 2008

Washington, DC – Freeze! No, it wasn’t the police or the FBI breaking into a house and yelling at a bunch of dangerous radicals. It was a hundred dangerous radicals telling the White House and the Pentagon to freeze their crimes against humanity — five years of heartless destruction of a five thousand year civilization.

The radicals were at Union Station in Washington mingling with a crowd of commuters on March 18. At a set moment they all ceased any motion and stood in place, unmoving and silent, to the surprise and confusion of the commuters. At the five-minute mark they all began chanting “Rise up! End the War!” Many commuters joined in. It was a marvelous moment.

Source.
Next Left Notes / The Rag Blog

Freeze Action in Washington, D.C. on March 23, 2008.

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Just What We Need

Posted on March 24, 2008 by RagBlog

Army Holds Annual ‘Bring Your Daughter To War’ Day

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Brian Kelly and the New SDS

Posted on March 24, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

“Violence doesn’t change society,” said Brian Kelly. What does, he says, is consciousness-raising, demonstrations, face-to-face meetings and radical Web sites. Photo by Michael Nagle, New York Times.

To the Ramparts (Gently)
By Ben Gibberd / New York Times /March 23, 2008

One March morning two years ago, a Pace University freshman named Brian Kelly and a dozen or so friends piled into a few cars and drove to the university’s Westchester County campus in Pleasantville, to attend a speech by former President Bill Clinton.

After the speech, which was part of the university’s centennial celebration, they submitted written questions for Mr. Clinton, as they had been invited to do.

Toward the end of the session, when they did not hear their questions asked of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Kelly tried a different tack.

“A friend and I got up and interrupted as a question about peace and democracy was being put to him by the university president,” he said. “And we said: ‘You’re a war criminal! What about Iraq and Bosnia and so forth?’ ”

Mr. Kelly and his friend were swiftly plucked from the auditorium by Secret Service agents and questioned for nearly an hour in a back room, he said.

Mr. Kelly speaks out a lot about politics these days, and not surprisingly. People like him are the new face of Students for a Democratic Society, the radical group that made headlines so often at the end of the 1960s.

On April 23, 1968 — 40 years ago next month — students at Columbia University, most notably S.D.S. members, took to the streets in the first major protest over the school’s plan to build a gym in Morningside Park; later in the spring, protesting the Vietnam War, the students seized several university buildings. By the time the demonstrators were forced out by the police, more than 700 students had been arrested and 150 had been hospitalized.

In the past few years, S.D.S. has re-emerged. But despite Mr. Kelly’s affiliation with the group and his actions during Mr. Clinton’s speech, he and other members of the new generation of S.D.S. approach politics in a strikingly different way from the firebrands of 1968. Mr. Kelly, for example, who spends much of his time hunched in front of his computer, sometimes sounds more like an earnest sociologist — the subject is his major — than a campus radical intent on scaling the ramparts.

“Society is made up of institutions, and institutions are built on consent,” Mr. Kelly said one recent morning during a wide-ranging conversation at a Starbucks cafe near Union Square. “And if you get people to say, ‘We withdraw our consent, we want new institutions, we want better policies,’ that’s how movements are built.”

The Stereotype, the Reality

“The mass media, with a little help from the older liberals, have painted a tyrannizing caricature of the ‘Student Rioter,’ ” the journalist Jack Newfield wrote in The New York Times in May 1969 in his review of “The Strawberry Statement,” James Simon Kunen’s account of the unrest at Columbia. “He has long dirty hair, an insatiable libido, and a four-letter word vocabulary. He is violent, irrational, anti-democratic.”

Sitting in Starbucks, Mr. Kelly, a clean-shaven, neatly dressed and highly composed 21-year old with close-cropped hair, hardly resembled the stereotypical radicals of 1968. Only the small pin on the lapel of his light brown jacket, depicting a bomb with a red line through it, and another on his shirt, reading “sds,” hinted at his politics.

He chose his words slowly and with a politician’s care, and his lean physique and wholesome demeanor suggested a track team member or an Eagle Scout — both of which Mr. Kelly was when he was growing up in Orange County, N.Y., about 90 minutes north of the city. His father is a computer programmer, his mother sells real estate, and both, he says, have been accepting of his political activities.

“They were a little hesitant after the Clinton thing, but they never asked me not to do anything,” Mr. Kelly said. “I think they understand.”

In high school, he was a student activist who engaged in what he described as “general liberal politics — blood drives, food drives, stuff around Darfur, that kind of thing.”

As a freshman at Pace’s main campus in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Kelly joined the school’s chapter of the Campus Anti-War Network, a national group opposed to the Iraq war. After S.D.S. was revived in January 2006 by two high school students, one from North Carolina, the other from Connecticut, the antiwar chapter became the Pace S.D.S. chapter. Other city schools with S.D.S. chapters include Queens College, New York University, Columbia University, Pratt Institute and New School University, most with about 25 members.

When the Pace chapter was born, Mr. Kelly’s activism really took off and he became, as he put it, “basically a full-time organizer” for the revived S.D.S. But when it comes to his attitude toward the violence of the ’60s, Mr. Kelly will never be mistaken for some of his predecessors.

“I actually think violent action isn’t radical at all,” he said firmly. “Radicals go to the root of the problem, and they want to change society. Violence doesn’t change society, and if it doesn’t go to the root of the problem, it’s not radical.” Mr. Kelly paused. “I don’t know what it is,” he added, “but it has nothing to do with what I want to do.”

Drama, Yes. Violence, No.

Despite his attitude toward violent protest, Mr. Kelly has not shied away from dramatic tactics. He has been arrested twice, once two years ago during a protest on Pace’s Manhattan campus, and once a year ago when he and about 20 other S.D.S. members were detained for occupying an Army-Navy recruiting center in Lower Manhattan. Neither arrest led to any charges.

No charges grew out of Mr. Kelly’s brief face-off with Mr. Clinton either, although the encounter had its unnerving moments.

“We were about 100 feet or so away from the president,” Mr. Kelly recalled. “And it all happened so fast I don’t remember being scared — more kind of nervous. These guys in generic suits just came toward us.”

Although he and his friends were not arrested, Mr. Kelly said that the Secret Service agents who grilled him and his friend called them “clowns” and said they might be held for 72 hours and forced to undergo psychiatric evaluation. Their cars were also searched without their consent, Mr. Kelly said, and their S.D.S. colleagues were questioned.

(Eric Zahren, a Secret Service spokesman, said of the episode, “We have great respect for individual freedoms, specifically freedom of speech, and do not set out to engage individuals who do not pose a threat to protectees. However, that determination in many cases cannot be made without simply speaking to people first.”)

Despite the events of that day, Mr. Kelly said he had never experienced hostility on his campus.

“Disagreement among some people,” he acknowledged, “but it’s a New York City campus, so a lot of people are progressive. Or a lot of people are just disengaged with politics. I’d say those are the typical reactions.”

His main goal, he said, “isn’t to take over a building, it isn’t to block a recruitment center. It isn’t to do any of these tactics that people kind of zero in on from the ‘60s. Our biggest goal is to get more people who are politicized, who are progressive, who want to join in a mass movement to help change the world.” Amid the chatter of the cafe and the piped-in music of Sheryl Crow and Frank Sinatra, Mr. Kelly’s phrase hung in the air, a momentary echo from another, more idealistic age.

Read all of it here.

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Deeply Troubling and Almost Entirely Overlooked

Posted on March 23, 2008 by RagBlog


One Foot in the Grave: Iran Attack Nearer, More Likely Than Most Suspect
by Chris Floyd / March 22, 2008

A very important, very disturbing — and almost entirely overlooked — piece appeared on Juan Cole’s Informed Comment site this week. It was a guest column by William R. Polk, laying out, in copious and convincing detail, the evidence indicating that the United States will indeed launch a military strike against Iran, most probably before George W. Bush leaves office.

However, even if Bush does hold off for some reason, the processes that Polk describes will almost certainly lead the next president into war with Iran, especially as the three remaining major candidates have forcefully pledged to keep “all options, and I mean, all options on the table” (Polk quotes Barack Obama’s bellicose formulation). And none of them are likely to have the political courage that Polk rightly says would be necessary to climb down from the highly aggressive posture that both parties have adopted toward Iran.

Polk is no radical firebrand; indeed, he comes toting heavy Establishment lumber: White House service (under John Kennedy), top academic and institutional posts, weighty books on history and international affairs, etc. Yet he paints as stark a picture of the situation as the most implacable dissident.

One development that has arisen after the article was posted gives added credence to Polk’s case. In recent days, both Bush and Dick Cheney have revived the scaremongering threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb that had seemed diffused by the NIE report earlier this year. Of course, that report — in which America’s myriad intelligence agencies declared their consensus view that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is moribund — was itself a more subtle piece of scaremongering. Because the report asserted — without any credible evidence — that Iran HAD been building a nuke until 2003. While the headlines focused on the overall conclusion, the Bush Administration made hay with that latter assertion: “See, we told you Iran has been building a nuclear weapon! We were right.”

They weren’t, of course, but this assertion was a propaganda weapon just waiting to be picked up: and now it has. Bush and Cheney refer to the NIE report as “proof” that Iran has been surreptitiously building nuclear weapons in the recent past — and therefore could be secretly building them again right now. Cheney was very explicit about this during his recent tour of Iraq and other stops in the Middle East — a trip that many have noted carries sinister echoes of a similar jaunt he made around the region just before the invasion of Iraq. As AP notes:

Vice President Dick Cheney retained his tough stance against Iran on Wednesday and said the U.S. is uncertain if Tehran has restarted the nuclear weaponization program that a U.S. intelligence report says it halted in 2003…Critics of the Bush administration said the report should dampen any campaign for a U.S. confrontation with Iran.

But Cheney that that while the NIE said Iran had a program to develop a nuclear warhead, it remains unclear if it has resumed that activity.

“What it (the NIE) says is that they have definitely had in the past a program to develop a nuclear warhead; that it would appear that they stopped that weaponization process in 2003. We don’t know whether or not they’ve restarted,” he said.

Bush too has been pushing this line, most recently in an interview with a government-funded Farsi-language radio station piping White House propaganda into Iran itself. As Dan Froomkin notes, Bush repeated the lie he has often told, asserting that Iran has “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people.” Iran has always declared the opposite, of course. Bush also echoed Cheney’s provocative “mystficiation” about the current state of the alleged Iranian weapons program. As Bush put it: “They’ve hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now, who knows?”

Read all of it here.

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Listen to the Winter Soldiers – Stop the Wars

Posted on March 23, 2008 by RagBlog

Pete Seeger to Winter Soldiers

Winter Soldier Marches Again
By Amy Goodman / truthdig / March 23, 2008

Last weekend, in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a remarkable gathering occurred just outside Washington, D.C., called Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations. Hundreds of veterans of these two wars, along with active-duty soldiers, came together to offer testimony about the horrors of war, including atrocities they witnessed or committed themselves.

The name, Winter Soldier, comes from a similar event in 1971, when hundreds of Vietnam veterans gathered in Detroit, and is derived from the opening line of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, “The Crisis,” published in 1776:

“These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

This Winter Soldier was organized by the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. Kelly Dougherty, an Iraq veteran from the Colorado Army National Guard and IVAW’s executive director, opened the proceedings, saying: “The voices of veterans and service members, as well as civilians on the ground, need to be heard by the American people, and by the people of the world, and also by other people in the military and other veterans so they can find their voice to tell their story, because each of our individual stories is crucially important and needs to be heard if people are to understand the reality and the true human cost of war and occupation.”

What followed were four days of gripping testimony, ranging from firsthand accounts of the murder of Iraqi civilians, the dehumanization of Iraqis and Afghanis that undergirds the violence of the occupations, to the toll that violence takes on the soldiers themselves and the inadequate care they receive upon returning home.

Jon Michael Turner, who fought with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, tore his medals off his chest. He said: “On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed kill. This man was innocent. I don’t know his name. I called him ‘the fat man.’ He was walking back to his house, and I shot him in front of his friend and his father. The first round didn’t kill him, after I had hit him up here in his neck area. And afterward he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. So I looked at my friend, who I was on post with, and I said, ‘Well, I can’t let that happen.’ So I took another shot and took him out. He was then carried away by the rest of his family. It took seven people to carry his body away.

“We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me, as he did everyone else in our company. This is the same individual who had stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death will get a four-day pass when we return from Iraq.”

Hart Viges was with the 82nd Airborne, part of the invasion in March 2003. He described a house raid where they arrested the wrong men: “We never went on a raid where we got the right house, much less the right person. Not once. I looked at my sergeant, and I was like, ‘Sergeant, these aren’t the men that we’re looking for.’ And he told me, ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure they would have done something anyways.’ And this mother, all the while, is crying in my face, trying to kiss my feet. And, you know, I can’t speak Arabic. I can speak human. She was saying, ‘Please, why are you taking my sons? They have done nothing wrong.’ And that made me feel very powerless. You know, 82nd Airborne Division, Infantry, with Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles and armor and my M4—I was powerless. I was powerless to help her.”

Former Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia also spoke. After serving in Iraq, he refused to return there. He was court-martialed and spent almost a year in prison. Mejia is now the chairman of IVAW. After he finished the testimony of his experience in Iraq, he laid out the group’s demands:

“We have over a million Iraqi dead. We have over 5 million Iraqis displaced. We have close to 4,000 dead [Americans]. We have close to 60,000 injured. That’s not even counting the post-traumatic stress disorder and all the other psychological and emotional scars that our generation is bringing home with them. War is dehumanizing a whole new generation of this country and destroying the people in the country of Iraq. In order for us to reclaim our humanity as a military and as a country, we demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, care and benefits for all veterans, and reparations for the Iraqi people so they can rebuild their country on their terms.”

As we enter the sixth year of the war in Iraq, more time than the U.S. was involved in World War II, we should honor the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, by listening to them.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.

Source

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Obama’s Latin American Policy

Posted on March 23, 2008 by RagBlog

Change? Not In America’s Backyard! Barack Obama’s Reactionary Stance Towards Latin America
By Chris Carlson / March 23, 2008

As progressives in the United States are riding a wave of excitement about Democratic hopeful Barack Obama and his promise of change, the people of Latin America have much less to be excited about. In fact, given some of his recent comments, Latin America might expect an even more aggressive policy from Barack Obama than what they saw under the Bush administration.

Latin America has long been regarded as America’s “backyard” by both US policymakers, and critics of US imperialism. Nationalist and revolutionary movements in Latin America have long expressed their desire to break away from being the “backyard” of the United States, and achieve their own independent economic development.

But US policymakers, from the Monroe Doctrine to the Truman Doctrine, have long seen Latin America as a strategic region with vast natural resources and lucrative markets which must remain inside the US sphere of influence, regardless of the desires of its people.

Barack Obama apparently feels the same. A few weeks ago he said as much, even using the infamous “backyard” label.

“We’ve been so obsessed with Iraq and so obsessed with the Middle East, we’ve been neglecting Latin America even in our own back yard,” he said at a campaign speech in Alexandria, Virginia. [1]

And he’s right. The Bush administration’s focus on the Middle East has given Latin America some breathing room from the usual US subversion and intervention so common throughout Latin America’s history. In the meantime, leftist leaders have come to power across the region like never before in a series of democratic revolutions dubbed the “Pink Tide.”

Many on the left have seen these developments as an enormous flowering of popular democracy and mass participation, and a clear break from the elitist democracies of the past. The masses have been relatively free to choose leftist and nationalist leaders in democratic elections, without them being toppled by US intervention, with some exceptions. [2]

But Barack Obama does not see it that way. In fact, he apparently views these developments as a problem that has been neglected by the Bush administration, as he warned recently:

“China has been sending diplomats and economic development specialists and building roads all throughout Latin America. They are securing trade agreements and contracts. And we ignore Latin America at our own peril.” [3]

In other words, US neglect of its “backyard” has allowed Latin America to have more freedom to trade with other countries, such as China; a certain threat to the interests of US corporations. Indeed, Latin America’s leftward sweep could prove threatening to US economic interests as the nations of the region seek to take control of their natural resources, diversify their economies, and break away from their dependence on US imports.

It is, of course, the right of any sovereign nation to do these things if it so desires, and Latin American leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa would argue that they are absolutely essential for the region’s development.

But Barack Obama views this as a problem; a result of US neglect of the region, and apparently hopes to roll back these democratic changes in Latin America. During a recent debate appearance in Austin, Texas he implied that US neglect of the region has allowed leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to have too much freedom.

“We’ve been diverted from focusing on Latin America… Is it any surprise, then, that you’ve seen people like Hugo Chavez and countries like China move into the void, because we’ve been neglectful of that,” he said. [4]

And Venezuela’s Chavez appears to be a particular problem for Obama; one that has led him to include Venezuela on a list of “rogue states,” along with Cuba, Iran and Syria, and to express his opposition to the Venezuelan president in a recent speech:

“I don’t actually agree with Chavez’s polices and how he’s dealing with his people,” he said. [5]

It apparently doesn’t matter that the Venezuelan people do agree with Chavez’s policies, and have repeatedly shown their widespread support of him in open democratic elections. And Obama evidently sees Venezuela as a “rogue state” not because it is a security threat, but because “[Chavez] has been using oil revenue to stir up trouble against the United States,” as he said recently. [6]

Indeed, many Latin American nations have recently gotten the “crazy” idea that they can use their own natural resources the way they want, and do not need to respect the interests of the United States. Venezuela’s Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales are among those who have nationalized their natural resources, and have begun to use the revenue the way they see fit.

Chavez especially has used Venezuela’s oil revenue to finance joint projects with other countries and to increase regional trade among Latin American nations. The policies have the goal of diversifying Venezuela’s economy, and severing the region’s dependence on the United States. [7]

If this is what Obama refers to as “stirring up trouble,” he is correct that these policies are not in the interests of US corporations that seek to maintain control of the markets and resources of Latin American countries. But shouldn’t the people of Latin America get to decide how the revenues from their resources are used? Or is this a decision that should come from Washington?

Read all of it (including missing references) here.

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Hot Shots and Classic Takes

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona shows a tattoo of Latin-American rebel Che Guevara during a press conference in Maracaibo, March 28, 2005 (Christian Veron/Reuters).

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Signs of a Sick Society

Posted on March 23, 2008 by RagBlog

This is also a well-known characteristic of fascist governments.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Quaker teacher fired for changing loyalty oath
Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 29, 2008

California State University East Bay has fired a math teacher after six weeks on the job because she inserted the word “nonviolently” in her state-required Oath of Allegiance form.

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees.

“I don’t think it was fair at all,” said Kearney-Brown. “All they care about is my name on an unaltered loyalty oath. They don’t care if I meant it, and it didn’t seem connected to the spirit of the oath. Nothing else mattered. My teaching didn’t matter. Nothing.”

A veteran public school math teacher who specializes in helping struggling students, Kearney-Brown, 50, had signed the oath before – but had modified it each time.

She signed the oath 15 years ago, when she taught eighth-grade math in Sonoma. And she signed it again when she began a 12-year stint in Vallejo high schools.

Each time, when asked to “swear (or affirm)” that she would “support and defend” the U.S. and state Constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Kearney-Brown inserted revisions: She wrote “nonviolently” in front of the word “support,” crossed out “swear,” and circled “affirm.” All were to conform with her Quaker beliefs, she said.

The school districts always accepted her modifications, Kearney-Brown said.

But Cal State East Bay wouldn’t, and she was fired on Thursday.

Modifying the oath “is very clearly not permissible,” the university’s attorney, Eunice Chan, said, citing various laws. “It’s an unfortunate situation. If she’d just signed the oath, the campus would have been more than willing to continue her employment.”

Modifying oaths is open to different legal interpretations. Without commenting on the specific situation, a spokesman for state Attorney General Jerry Brown said that “as a general matter, oaths may be modified to conform with individual values.” For example, court oaths may be modified so that atheists don’t have to refer to a deity, said spokesman Gareth Lacy.

Kearney-Brown said she could not sign an oath that, to her, suggested she was agreeing to take up arms in defense of the country.

“I honor the Constitution, and I support the Constitution,” she said. “But I want it on record that I defend it nonviolently.”

The trouble began Jan. 17, a little more than a week after she started teaching at the Hayward campus. Filling out her paperwork, she drew an asterisk on the oath next to the word “defend.” She wrote: “As long as it doesn’t require violence.”

The secretary showed the amended oath to a supervisor, who said it was unacceptable, Kearney-Brown recalled.

Shortly after receiving her first paycheck, Kearney-Brown was told to come back and sign the oath.

This time, Kearney-Brown inserted “nonviolently,” crossed out “swear,” and circled “affirm.”

That’s when the university sought legal advice.

Read the rest here.

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Peace, Justice AND Sustainability

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Jensen: Look beyond war and peace to global justice
By Robert Jensen / March 23, 2008

Now that we have passed the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s a good time to step back for a look not at how we went wrong but what we need to do to get on the right path.
It has long been a staple of the anti-war movement that there can be no meaningful peace without justice on a global scale. Those of us living in the First World, especially in the United States, cannot pretend to be working for peace unless we also are working for a more just and equitable distribution of the world’s resources.

The anti-war/peace movement, therefore, must also be a movement focused on the grotesque inequalities in a predatory corporate capitalist system. In a world where half the population lives on less than $2 a day, it’s clear that the global economy is itself a form of war on billions of people. In such a profoundly unjust world, armed conflict is inevitable because there always will be resistance to inequality. Powerful states will respond militarily to any threat, real or perceived, to their dominance.

In other words: No justice, no peace.

Now it’s time for us to take the next step: We must recognize that there can be no justice over the long term without sustainability, and creating a sustainable world will require not only radical change in systems and structures of power but also a radical change in the way we in affluent societies live.

It’s time to recognize that if we are serious about the values of equality that we claim are the core of our politics, we must scale back the level at which we live.

No reduction in First World consumption, no justice; and no justice, no peace.

One cannot be a serious peace activist without putting peace in the context of justice and sustainability, and the high-energy/high-tech lifestyle of the First World is not sustainable and not compatible with the demands of justice. Meaningful peace requires real justice, which means we must learn to live with less.

We could start by applying a “Golden Rule” of consumption. Working from the common moral principle that we should follow a path based on rules that we would be willing to apply to all, we could begin with this: Consume at a level that, if applied throughout the world, would allow all people a decent life consistent with long-term sustainability. That doesn’t prescribe a destination but suggests a direction; instead of anyone sanctimoniously dictating a specific lifestyle, we can collectively recognize that we must move toward living lower on the food chain, using far less energy, consuming far fewer of the planet’s limited resources, generating far less toxic waste.

Though some might see this as a sacrifice — and in some sense, of course, we will have to give up material things that we have come to rely on and enjoy — this moment in history also provides us with a chance to redefine what it means to live a good life. Rather than accept the mad scramble to accumulate goods and insulate ourselves from the natural world — the good life as defined in a consumer capitalist society awash in high-tech toys and mass-mediated entertainment — we can reorient ourselves toward the traditional definition of a good life in terms of community and connection with others, service and sacrifice for others, and a deeper sense of meaning for ourselves.

Eloquent calls for peace are easy to make from the material comfort of the First World. Moving beyond that to a demand for meaningful justice gets us closer to the goal. A commitment to a sustainable level of consumption should be at the core of this work.

It will be a struggle, of course, often confusing and sometimes painful. But we can remember that there is joy in the struggle for a better world, which is always at the same time a struggle to become more fully human.

Jensen (rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu) is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. This article appeared in the March 23, 2008 Austin American-Statesman as an op-ed piece.

Source.
From Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Left and Barack Obama — T. Dreyer and D. Hamilton

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

There is much to like in Barack Obama

Most of the activists I work with in Austin, those of us in MDS/Austin (Movement for a Democratic Society) and other progressive groups, have chosen to support and, in many cases to actively participate in the campaign of Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, for a number of reasons. For this writer at least, those reasons include the following:

We find Barack Obama to be sincerely left-leaning and personally inspiring, and believe him worthy of trust, with the requisite reservations. We see the massive and enthusiatic and largely radical-leaning movement that his campaign has engendered to be a surprisingly positive sign in a largely lethargic times, and at the very least a fertile ground for future activism.

We consider the election of a progressive black man to the highest elective office in our country to be a quantum step forward in a nation with such a legacy of racism. (We will also consider the eventual election of a woman as president to be such a step.)

We believe the election of a progressive Democrat at this time in history would result in a quick end to the tragic War in Irag, the introduction of such progressive measures as universal (or virtually universal) health care, and would produce judicial and other governmental appointments that would make a very real difference in people’s lives.
This would result in real, tangible changes in the lives of struggling lower income citizens, of racial minorities, of those rotting in jail because of race or victimless crimes, and, significantly, of oppressed peoples in other parts of the world.

And, taking into account that both major parties, in the long haul, represent similar if not identical vested interests, we believe that the Republicans, with their corporate masters, with their oppressive and mean-spirited politics at times verging on the neo-fascist, must be stopped.

It is of critical importance that we never latch on to a political candidate in this electoral system and herald him or her as some kind of a savior. Bottom line, the problems in this country are not based in who runs the system. The system itself is the problem. The shameful disparity in distribution of wealth between the obscenely rich and those left to struggle for their daily needs.

The greatly disproportionate power of the corporate few. The grievous neglect of basic human needs, civil rights, civil liberties and privacy; the acceptance of torture and other sanctioned forms of inhumane treatment; doing virtually nothing to fight and a whole lot to accelerate the quickening environmental disaster. And the United States’ imperialist international policies fueled by greed.

All that taken into account, we believe that there is much to like about Barack Obama, and that there are substantial and valid reasons to work for his election.

Thorne Dreyer / March 23, 2008 / The Rag Blog


Purists who reject him offer no alternative

The Rag Blog’s David Hamilton wrote the following in response to those on the left who see supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama as being a “trick bag” for radicals. It was inspired in part by “US Presidential Candidates: Warmongers All,” posted to The Rag Blog on March 21, 2008. Participation in mainstream party politics always raises issues in the left community, and they are legitimate. Here’s David’s answer.

In 1936, the French Communist Party ended years of conflict with the French Socialist Party and established a united front that elected Leon Blum as the first socialist prime minister of France. That united front passed reforms that have characterized the socialist aspect of French society ever since.

I am not a Democrat. I have not voted for the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party since 1972 and have not participated in their primary process since the Jackson campaign of 1988.

I support Barack Obama enthusiastically. I do not do so because I don’t find things to criticize in what he says. I do so because, to a much greater degree than any other major party politician, I trust him. I trust him to do what he promises and talk to our supposed “enemies” instead of threaten them. In that, there is the kernel of the rejection of the militarism that is intrinsic to US imperialism.

Why do I trust him? There are many answers, many subjective and intangible. But what impressed me most was that he went from being president of the Harvard Law Review to being a community organizer working out of a store front on the south side of Chicago. He could have joined any prestigious law firm or clerked for any Supreme Court justice, but he instead chose to work with poor people, helping them meet their most basic needs.

I expect to be disappointed. I expect to have to criticize him and exert pressure on him from the left. I also expect him to make statements in order to get elected that I disagree with. But this time, I see a chance for a transformational figure who might just change the course of US history and I’m taking that chance.

In the process, we are supporting a “Plan for the Complete Withdrawal of all US Military Forces from Iraq in 2009” in the Democratic Party local convention as a way to push the eventual nominee toward that position. As Tom Hayden advised, either the antiwar movement can get involved in the process or it can stand sanctimoniously to the side.

Purists who reject him have no alternative other that “build an anti-imperialist movement.” That is a false dichotomy. In November, hopefully you will have the opportunity to vote for Barack Obama for president. The ideal anti-imperialist won’t be on the ballot. Relate to that reality. He may disappoint somewhere along the way, but he is by far the best major party candidate I’ve ever seen.

David Hamilton / March 23, 2008 / The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

White Folks Have a Hard Time Hearing the Truth

Posted on March 23, 2008 by RagBlog

Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth
By Tim Wise, March 18, 2008

For most white folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–occasionally Barack Obama’s pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity–for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an “angry black man” like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn’t he say that America “got what it deserved” on 9/11? And didn’t he say that black people should be singing “God Damn America” because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn’t.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around–a notion with longstanding theological grounding–and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and “never batted an eye.” That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and “save American lives.”

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman’s own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we’re the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would “never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”

And Wright didn’t say blacks should be singing “God Damn America.” He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn’t happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don’t believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks–and I do, for instance–it is worth pointing out that Wright isn’t the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early ’90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed “undesirable” including gays and racial minorities.

So that’s the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America’s favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those “prosperity ministers” who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

Read the rest here.

From Jeff Jones / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment