The Rag Blog

03/02/07 “ICH” — — The president and the Pentagon now wield the omnipotent power to arrest, torture, and execute any American they label an “enemy combatant.” It is impossible to overstate the significance of this power. It has totally upended the relationship of the military and civilian in the United States. The assumption of this particular power easily constitutes one of the most monumental revolutions of liberty and power in history. It is a revolution that every American must confront now, not later. If people wait until later to confront the expanded use of this power, it will be too late, because by that time it will be too dangerous to do so.

As long as this particular power is permitted to stand, there is no possibility for Americans to be considered a free people. A necessary prerequisite for restoring freedom to our land is the removal of this power from the arsenal of government officials.

Everyone needs to understand the nature of this power and its enormous significance. Historically, the U.S. military has lacked the power to arrest, incarcerate, or inflict harm on American civilians. If Americans committed a federal crime, they were subject to being indicted by a federal grand jury and then prosecuted in U.S. District Court. The Bill of Rights guaranteed that the accused would be accorded certain rights of due process of law, such as the right to defend himself with the assistance of an attorney, to confront the witnesses whose testimony the prosecutors were relying on, to summon witnesses in his behalf, to remain silent, and to have a trial by jury. Everyone was presumed to be innocent and the government had to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Those constitutional protections and guarantees were upended on 9/11, without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment. On 9/11 the president and the Pentagon assumed to themselves the power to take any American into custody and inflict violence on him, without according him any of the protections provided by the Bill of Rights. Today, the Pentagon has the authority, on orders of its commander in chief, to send American soldiers into any neighborhood in the country and take into custody any American citizen and inflict harm on him simply by labeling him an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terror.”

Let me emphasize something important here, especially for libertarians, who have long committed their lives to the achievement of a free society: There is no way – none – to reconcile the assumption of this power with a free society. In fact, it is the most powerful government power of all – the ultimate power that can ever be wielded by a tyrannical government. No infringement on economic liberty – hyperinflation, confiscatory taxation, oppressive regulation, or the like – can compare in significance with the omnipotent power of a government official to arbitrarily pick up anyone he wants for any reason he wants and incarcerate him, torture him, and execute him.

The Democrats’ obfuscation and confusion

To use Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi’s favorite opening line, “Let me be clear” – The Democrats are hell-bent for war and everyone with brain-1 knows it. All their talk of the non-binding resolution against the war, their newly found, vociferous opposition to the war, their attacks on the Bush regime (internicine fighting for the spoils of war) and of bringing the troops home by 2008 (2 more years of slaughter), their refusal to defund the war to “support the troops”, their claim that their hands are tied leaving them helpless to stop the war – all this talk is nothing less than obfuscation intended to make a simple matter a complex and confusing one.

On December 5, shortly after the people voted for the Democrats to end the war in the mid-term elections, Pelosi went on record, “Let me be clear. We will not cut off funding for the troops. Absolutely not!”. Two days ago she repeated that position, stating that the Democrats would not cut off funds arguing incredibly that to do so would put U.S. troops in jeopardy. Yesterday NPR recorded her again, “Let me be clear. We will not cut off funding for our troops.”

What is it that the Democrats are Refusing to Defund?

Let’s take a look at exactly what it is that the Democrats in Congress are refusing to stop:

Recently, the Bush regime has targetted the Iraqi Resistance in Baghdad when he asked congress to give him “one last chance” to win the war. The most recent U.S. tactic to accomplish this bloody affair has been mass-scale bombing of neighborhoods in Baghdad, currently being carried out under the rubric, “Joint U.S.-Iraqi Security Operation”, otherwise dubbed by the Pentagon, “Operation Enforce-the-Law” or “Operation Law Enforcement”. This “security operation” is certainly not providing security for those dying and fleeing from U.S. bombs in the neighborhoods.

Yesterday (March 1, 2007), Tom Bullock, NPR’s mouthpiece in Baghdad, reported that the U.S. military has been carrying out “heavy bombing … in numerous neighborhoods in and around Baghdad” attempting to wipe out “car bomb factories”. Almost immediately after these latest U.S. attacks, Tom Bullock described these neighborhoods as “densely populated”. When asked about reports of casualties, the NPR reporter said the bombing continued for about 2 hours and just ceased “so it’s too early to know the extent of casualties”. True to form, NPR couched this report in terms sypathetic to this U.S. attack on the people of Iraq, citing the numbers of U.S. troops previously killed by IED explosives and a recent bombing of the Iraqi police who serve the puppeteer of the U.S. installed regime. NPR referred to this escalation of the war using the Pentagon’s new coinage: “Operation Law Enforcement” intended to bring about “security” in Baghdad. They undergirded their report with references to prior IED attacks by “Sunni Insurgents” rather than the Iraqi Resistance forces against the occupation.

20 minutes after the NPR report cited above, the NPR script was apparently rewritten for Bullock deleting references to the “heavy bombing” in “dense neighborhoods”. In the new version, NPR described this as a “security crackdown”.

Iraqi victims of the war

Here’s an Axis transcript of Tom Bullock’s words on NPR:

“Dozens of loud explosions were heard today throughout Baghdad. In a city where explosions are common these stood out. A series of blasts coming in quick succession. A U.S. official … says the explosions were an artillary barrage targetting predominantly Sunni neighborhoods in and around the city, part of a planned U.S. military operation targeting a car-bomb network in and around Baghdad. A high level military official says the operation will last for days and be followed up with U.S. and Iraqi ground troops. Car bombs remain a serious threat throughout Iraq. At least one exploded on Thursday in the City of Fallujah targetting a police convoy. The blast killed at least 5 Iraqi policemen and wounded at least 10 others. The group was heading to a wedding.”

Note the emotional pull at the end of the NPR report: “The group was heading to a wedding party”, Bullock stated, with his voice dipping into pity, but no pity for those children, women and men who are being killed and wounded in Iraq today under the current, escalation of U.S. attacks in Baghdad.

Robust Military Response by the Resistance

In the midst of this intensified U.S. bombing of dense neighborhoods in Baghdad, the BBC tells us today (March 2) that the Iraqi Resistance has carried out a successful military operation, killing 14 Iraqi policemen who are working under their employer and paymaster, the United States government. The Democrats will not have to defund the salaries for those “police” – the Iraqi Resistance has done it for them.

The Democratic Congress Supports the War

This aggression and violence being brought down on the heads of the Iraqi people this week is precisely what the Democrats are supporting with their refusal to end the war. Immediately after the Democratic Party was voted into control of both houses of the Congress they began to depict the U.S. occupation in Iraq as “complicated” by “sectarian conflict” and “impending civil war”. Upon this “complicated situation” they layered additional “concerns” with predictions of a Shia slaughter of Sunnis if the U.S. were to abruptly withdraw from Iraq. This argument amounts to nothing less than killing Iraqis to save Iraqis … or to save Iraqis from themselves – burning the village to save the village. Either way, it amounts to murder – not “collateral damage” – not even “killing” – let’s not mince our words – the term is mass murder. What else can it be called? Nearly a million Iraqi people have been slaughtered, directly or indirectly by the U.S. government in the last 4 years of war and occupation.

The Democrats join Bush Fear-Mongering

Some years ago, I read a beautiful Sufi treatise by Farradin’Attar entitled “Conference of the Birds”.
Like all powerful Sufi stories, this one stayed with me.
The story, an allegory, is basically about a flock of different kinds of birds wanting to meet the Simorgh. The Simorgh being none other than the “highest” Bird.
After a lengthy and torturous travel route, only a few made it to the Simorgh.
Many gave up half way. Some got stuck in their own stories, others just dropped out from sheer exhaustion and others were afraid to venture beyond…
But only those that were earnestly seeking to meet Him, managed to make it and reached their final destination.
Of course, Farradin’Attar in his brilliant way, meant the Simorgh as a metaphor for Truth.

Now, I have been receiving tons of mail, from all kinds of people…
I assume they too are searching for the Truth.
But like some of the birds in the Sufi tale, they are stuck.

Some write to me with the same old verbiage, regurgitated about a thousand times…
And it goes like this:” I am anti-occupation, but…Saddam was an Imperialist thug”…”I am against what is happening but you see, you have to understand, that Saddam was a tyrant”…”I really don’t like this, but frankly you guys brought it onto yourselves…after all he was a dictator”…” It is all because of him…he was nothing but a traitor”…” He was a CIA/Zionist agent…yeah that’s him”…

Some are slightly more sophisticated. They use “important” terminology.
Like big impressive words and get their nickers in a twist with detailed analysis that amounts to nothing really. Others are plain obnoxious…

But none of the above actually bother me …I see them for what they are.
Either a very ignorant bunch, or people who can’t be bothered to think for themselves and opt instead for ready made slogans and that is so much easier, I do concede that.
And some are simply too “basic” to articulate …
In the past, this would anger me. Then it irritated me. Now I simply don’t care.

I have studied closely what is happening to Iraq – too closely, for comfort.
I know who the main players are. I know what the long term plan is. I know what the regional interests are all about…And more importantly, I am made of the “same mud” and “some things” you just know. Informed comment or no informed comment, with and without Empire analysis…

And I know enough about human psychology to realize how power plays, influence and coercion, manipulation and outright deceit work…

I like details but I prefer the end result. I like to see the trees, but I prefer gazing at the forest.
I, in fact, like to see the bigger picture. And for that, one needs to fly high above.

You see, am a bird too… and I love soaring…
And during one of my flights, this is what I saw:

That an imperialist thug would not voluntarily walk to the gallows when he had a chance for a compromise with his predators…
That a dictator who cares about Unity is no longer a dictator…
That a tyrant would save his backside. He could become another Pinochet or a Shah in exile…
That a traitor would not have men loyal to (his) similar ideals still fight the Occupation, sacrificing their families, their future, their lives ….in the same manner that he did.
That a CIA/Zionist agent who wants the blessings of the twinsouls, would still be alive now and running the show…Just look at the majority of the other Arab leaders.

I also saw that Freedom with no dignity is worthless…That democracy with no voice is an empty corrupt word…That love with no commitment is cheap…
And, that parrots look good on the outside. They have a colorful and exotic plumage…but their language is ….oh well….you know…only slogans.
And like in the Conference of the Birds, the parrots kept talking to themselves whilst other birds reached the Simorgh…

The U.S. government and military has undergone a series of jolting expansions in the Bush years. We got, for instance, a second Defense Department called the Department of Homeland Security. We got a military command for North America called United States Northern Command. More than anything else, however, while we already had an “imperial presidency,” we also got an add-on — an imperial vice-presidency, a new form of shadow government in the United States, a startlingly unbound, constitutionally unmandated new institutional power.

On taking office, Dick Cheney promptly began to set up a vice-presidential office that essentially mimicked, and then to some extent replaced, the National Security Council (NSC). Just as promptly, his office plunged itself into utter, blinding secrecy — as journalist Robert Dreyfuss discovered when he simply tried to chart out who was working in this new center of power. No information, it turned out, could be revealed to a curious reporter, not even the names and positions of those who worked for the Vice President, those who, theoretically, were working for us. Cheney’s office would not even publicly acknowledge its own employees, no less let them be interviewed.

From that office (and allied posts elsewhere in the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy), the Vice President and his various right-hand men like I Lewis “Scooter” Libby and present Chief of Staff David Addington, both fierce believers in the so-called unitary executive theory of government (in which a “wartime” commander-in-chief president is said to have unfettered power to command just about anything), elbowed the State Department, the NSC, and the Intelligence Community. With the President’s ear, and in league with Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon (among others), they spearheaded a series of mis- and disinformation operations that led to Iraq and beyond. (Reporter Jim Lobe wrote about this at Tomdispatch in August 2005, “Dating Cheney’s Nuclear Drumbeat.”)

Now shorn of Rumsfeld, Cheney and his men, increasingly beleaguered, are nonetheless pushing on as the Vice President secretively travels the world, warning and scheming. Only this week, in “The Redirection,” a New Yorker piece as chilling as any you might ever want to read, our premier journalist of this era (as well as the Vietnam one), Seymour Hersh reports that, two years ago, old hands from the Iran-Contra fiasco of the Reagan era, well-seeded into the Bush administration, had an informal meeting led by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Their conclusions: “As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: ‘One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office.”

That’s what passes for learning from experience in the Bush/Cheney White House. Indeed, the same folks are now evidently running an updated version of Iran-Contra (without the CIA) out of the Vice President’s office. At the same time, according to Hersh, Cheney, in his urge to roll back Iranian regional power as well as undermine Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia in Iraq, and the Syrians, has set the Saudis loose to fund Sunni jihadis — just as they did in Afghanistan at American behest in the 1980s. The result then was, among other things, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. So imagine: Cheney’s office is now working hard to combine the worst of the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal with the worst of the Afghan disaster. I wonder what the results could possibly be?

The history of this sudden explosion of ultra-secretive vice-presidential power remains to be written, based on documents that have not yet seen the light of day. The Libby trial has recently offered us a glimpse into the most secretive and powerful office in the land and its interplay with the White House, State Department, and CIA. As former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega points out below, that glimpse should be enough to trigger a Congressional investigation into the Plame case. It’s time, she tells us, for Congress to investigate all the President’s and Vice President’s men and women.

De la Vega has written a remarkable, must-read book about how we were defrauded into war in Iraq, United States v. George W. Bush et al. Every day since it first appeared, our country has come to look ever more like a United States v. Bush/Cheney world. De la Vega is a woman who should be heeded. Tom

Public Misconduct: A Call to Investigate All of the President’s Men
By Elizabeth de la Vega

Last week, apparently belatedly realizing the obvious — that the attack on former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame was a White House family affair — New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called for the administration to come clean. Bush and Cheney owe “the American people a candid explanation” of their conduct with regard to the leaking of Plame’s identity as a CIA agent, Kristof insisted.

If, after observing this administration for over six years, Nicholas Kristof thinks that the President and Vice President are going to suddenly be overcome by conscience and tell all because he has put his foot down, then Nicholas Kristof is downright adorable.

The trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was merely a snapshot view of this administration in daily action; but incomplete as it was, it nevertheless starkly revealed what many had known all along: that the most powerful officials in the United States government — including, but not limited to, the Vice President, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff, the Deputy Secretary of State, the President’s Press Secretary, the President’s Chief of Staff, and, yes, the President himself — had responded to the barrage of criticism being aimed at their fictitious case for war in the spring and summer of 2003 by focusing their sights on a man and woman who had devoted their lives to public service.

Such people — those who will use the highest offices of the United States government to protect themselves and their prospects for reelection by whatever means they deem necessary, regardless of the damage they leave in their wake — are not going to confess to anything…ever.

Indeed, in answer to questions from a reporter about this very issue on February 14, President Bush explained helpfully, “I’m not going to talk about any of it.” We will surely all expire if we hold our collective breath waiting for the President to change his mind about this (or anything else, for that matter). Fortunately, we do not need to hear what Bush and Cheney have to say about “it” right now.

Nor do we have to wait for the outcome of any further investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, even though it is entirely possible he and his eminently capable prosecutors Peter Zeidenberg, Debra Bonamici, and the rest of their team will continue to explore possible criminal activity on the part of Vice President Cheney and others. A continued investigation would, in fact, be both appropriate and warranted, given the abundant evidence of Cheney’s wrongdoing.

ZURICH, Switzerland (March 2) – What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered 1.2 miles across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

In recent days, we’ve have two reports on timing, when it comes to the future of the President’s “surge” plan for Baghdad. According to Richard A. Oppel of the New York Times, “The plan, which calls for 17,000 additional troops in Baghdad, will continue until at least this fall, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, told CNN on Wednesday. ‘I don’t want to put an exact time on it, but a minimum of six to nine months.'” On the other hand, Simon Tisdale of the British Guardian reports that the new military “brain trust,” headed by Lt. General David H. Petraeus, which has just surged into Baghdad’s Green Zone, is operating on a more truncated schedule. Petraeus’s men, who believe themselves to be working with too little of everything, especially boots on the ground — since the Iraqi government has once again not delivered its promised full contingents — have “concluded the US has six months to win the war in Iraq — or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.”

Give me a buck for every predicted six-to-nine month window of opportunity from the military or the White House in the last four years and I’d be rich as Croesus. Amid the hopeless chaos of Iraq, you can already hear various individuals preparing their exculpatory “exit strategies” from this war. So many key players are going to stab one another in the back with their various explanations for failure in the coming years that blood will run between the pages of the many memoirs still to be published.

Of course, for the neocons, the Bush White House, the Vice President and his crew, and various military and intelligence types, the real villains will not, in the end, be themselves. Count on this: The “weak-willed” American people will take the brunt of the official blame (with the “liberal” media, Democratic and Republican politicians who opposed the war, and the antiwar movement, as well as the incompetence of anyone but the speaker of the moment, thrown in for good measure).

As Ira Chernus points out below, we’ve heard this tune before — and once upon a time, in the post-Vietnam years, it ended up playing us for a long, long while. The question is: Will history repeat itself in the wake of an American defeat in the Middle East?

Here’s the money paragraph in the Tisdale piece, which should have a Surgeon General’s warning attached to it:

“Possibly the biggest longer-term concern of Gen Petraeus’s team is that political will in Washington may collapse just as the military is on the point of making a decisive counter-insurgency breakthrough. According to a senior administration official, speaking this week, this is precisely what happened in the final year of the Vietnam war.”

Mom, I tell you that fish I had hooked was at least as long as the boat and I was just bringing it in when you made me come home… Tom

Will We Suffer from the Iraq Syndrome? Beware of the Boomerang
By Ira Chernus

The Iraq syndrome is headed our way. Perhaps it’s already here.

A clear and growing majority of Americans now tell pollsters that that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake, that it’s a bad idea to “surge” more troops into Baghdad, that we need a definite timeline for removing all our troops.

The nation seems to be remembering a lesson of the Vietnam War: We can’t get security by sending military power abroad. Every time we try to control another country by force of arms, we only end up more troubled and less secure.

But the Iraq syndrome is a two-edged sword, and there is no telling which way it will cut in the end.

Remember the “Vietnam syndrome,” which made its appearance soon after the actual war ended in defeat. It did restrain our appetite for military interventions overseas — but only briefly. By the late 1970s, it had already begun to boomerang. Conservatives denounced the syndrome as evidence of a paralyzing, Vietnam-induced surrender to national weakness. Their cries of alarm stimulated broad public support for an endless military build-up and, of course, yet more imperial interventions.

The very idea of such a “syndrome” implied that what the Vietnam War had devastated was not so much the Vietnamese or their ruined land as the traumatized American psyche. As a concept, it served to mask, if not obliterate, many of the realities of the actual war. It also suggested that there was something pathological in a post-war fear of taking our arms and aims abroad, that America had indeed become (in Richard Nixon’s famous phrase) a “pitiful, helpless giant,” a basket case.

Ronald Reagan played all these notes skillfully enough to become president. The desire to “cure” the Vietnam syndrome became a springboard to unabashed, militant nationalism and a broad rightward turn in the nation’s life.

Iraq — both the war and the “syndrome” to come — could easily evoke a similar set of urges: to evade a painful reality and ignore the lessons it should teach us. The thought that Americans are simply a collective neurotic head-case when it comes to the use of force could help sow similar seeds of insecurity that might — after a pause — again push our politics and culture back to a glorification of military power and imperial intervention as instruments of choice for seeking “security.”

But everyone should pay attention especially to this para. in the WaPo report:

‘The committee also released an internal Army memorandum reportedly written in September in which the Walter Reed garrison commander, Col. Peter Garibaldi, warned Weightman that “patient care services are at risk of mission failure” because of staff shortages brought on by privatization of the support work force at the hospital.’