Chris Hedges's Blog, page 629

In Defense of Julian Assange and Free Speech

If it was ever clear that the case of Julian Assange was never just a legal case, but a struggle for the protection of basic human rights, it is now.

Citing his critical tweets about the recent detention of Catalan President Carles Puigdemont in Germany, and following pressure from the U.S., Spanish and U.K. governments, the Ecuadorean government has installed an electronic jammer to stop Assange from communicating with the outside world via the internet and phone. As if ensuring his total isolation, the Ecuadorean government is also refusing to allow him to receive visitors. Despite two U.N. rulings describing his detention as unlawful and mandating his immediate release, Assange has been effectively imprisoned since he was first placed in isolation in Wandsworth prison in London in December 2010. He has never been charged with a crime. The Swedish case against him collapsed and was withdrawn, while the United States has stepped up efforts to prosecute him. His only “crime” is that of a true journalist—telling the world the truths that people have a right to know.

Under its previous president, the Ecuadorean government bravely stood against the bullying might of the United States and granted Assange political asylum as a political refugee. International law and the morality of human rights was on its side.

Today, under extreme pressure from Washington and its collaborators, another government in Ecuador justifies its gagging of Assange by stating that Assange’s behavior, through his messages on social media, put at risk good relations that Ecuador has with the U.K., the rest of the EU and other nations.

This censorious attack on free speech is not happening in Turkey, Saudi Arabia or China; it is right in the heart of London. If the Ecuadorean government does not cease its unworthy action, it, too, will become an agent of persecution rather than the valiant nation that stood up for freedom and for free speech. If the EU and the U.K. continue to participate in the scandalous silencing of a true dissident in their midst, it will mean that free speech is indeed dying in Europe.

This is not just a matter of showing support and solidarity. We are appealing to all who care about basic human rights to call on the government of Ecuador to continue defending the rights of a courageous free speech activist, journalist and whistleblower.

We ask that his basic human rights be respected as an Ecuadorean citizen and internationally protected person and that he not be silenced or expelled.

If there is no freedom of speech for Julian Assange, there is no freedom of speech for any of us—regardless of the disparate opinions we hold.

We call on President Lenín Moreno to end the isolation of Julian Assange now.

List of signatories (in alphabetical order):

Pamela Anderson, actress and activist

Jacob Appelbaum, freelance journalist

Renata Avila, International Human Rights Lawyer

Sally Burch, British/Ecuadorean journalist

Alicia Castro, Argentina’s ambassador to the United Kingdom 2012-16

Naomi Colvin, Courage Foundation

Noam Chomsky, linguist and political theorist

Brian Eno, musician

Joseph Farrell, WikiLeaks Ambassador and board member of The Centre for Investigative Journalism

Teresa Forcades, Benedictine nun, Montserrat Monastery

Charles Glass, American-British author, journalist, broadcaster

Chris Hedges, journalist

Srećko Horvat, philosopher, Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25)

Jean Michel Jarre, musician

John Kiriakou, former CIA counterterrorism officer and former senior investigator, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

Lauri Love, computer scientist and activist

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, presidential adviser

John Pilger, journalist and filmmaker

Angela Richter, theater director, Germany

Saskia Sassen, sociologist, Columbia University

Oliver Stone, filmmaker

Vaughan Smith, English journalist

Yanis Varoufakis, economist, former Greek finance minister

Natalia Viana, investigative journalist and co-director of Agencia Publica, Brazil

Ai Weiwei, artist

Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer and activist

Slavoj Žižek, philosopher, Birkbeck Institute for Humanities

American History for Truthdiggers: Independence and Civil War (1775-1783)

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “Make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the fifth installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His wartime experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 5 of “American History for Truthdiggers.” / See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.

 * * *

“The war [of independence] was not just about home rule, but about who would rule at home.”

—Historian Carl Becker

What sort of revolution was it? Radical or conservative? Military or social? Earnestly democratic or hypocritical farce?

Perhaps a bit of them all. What it most certainly was not was what is presented in the comfortable, patriotic, grade-school yarn to which we’ve all grown accustomed. Yet, neither was it something out of a fable of white privilege that can be dismissed outright.

Let us begin with the famous painting above, commissioned by the U.S. Congress and displayed in the Capitol Rotunda. This rendering prompts some questions: Who, exactly, won the war and what sort of war was it? What’s not depicted? And why? The artist captures the moment of British surrender after the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. It’s all so neat, so symmetrical, with regular Continental Army soldiers mounted and standing at right, and equally spiffy French troopers, replete with clean white uniforms, at left. The humbled redcoats stand beneath an American officer and offer their surrender as a mounted Gen. George Washington observes from the rear, at right.

Were this the only portrait available for posterity, the viewer might assume the War of Independence was a rather conventional, military affair, waged tidily between two gentlemanly armies. The popular image is something like this: The Continental Army—with some help from the French—vanquished the Brits and won a new, independent nation. There was no dirt, no grime, nothing messy or complex. There were no women, no blacks, no Native Americans, certainly no loyalists or uncouth colonial militiamen involved.

Perhaps this is how Americans like to remember the Revolution, how elementary school teachers transmit this epic past.

As we’ve seen in earlier installments in this Truthdig series, the way we remember the past is as fascinating and instructive as the reality of events. This is particularly true of the American Revolution, which, I would suggest, is America’s second origins myth, a saga of colonial liberty smiting British tyranny once and for all, a story topped only by the initial settlement of the colonies. Would that it were so simple. …

When evaluating the American Revolution, we must essentially parse out comprehensive answers to the following questions: How and why did rebels—whose army never won a battle in the open field—defeat the most powerful empire in the Western World? How was the social and military experience of revolution lived and experienced by a diverse colonial population? And, finally, what did it mean to “win,” and who exactly were the war’s winners and losers? In seeking to answer these questions, we may not always like what we find, may become confused by the cluttered conglomeration of the Revolutionary experience. Still, perhaps we will also unearth something profound about who we were, as Americans, who we strove to be, and how far we’ve come in achieving our great revolution.

Blood Has Been Shed: From Lexington to Bunker Hill

In installment four of this series we left our anguished—and hopelessly divided—American colonists on the verge of rebellion, just 12 years after the defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War. With the benefit of hindsight, revolution appears all but inevitable; yet, nothing was predetermined. Some spark was needed to engulf the continent in bloodshed. It would come in Massachusetts.

On the eve of war, the British, like so many regular imperial armies before them, believed they could intimidate the rebels with a display of impressive uniforms, lockstep marching and a basic show of force. In and around Boston, the British sought to seize large stores of colonial arms and, in that strategic vein, marched out of the city toward the village of Concord in April 1775. They bet wrong, and the overt show of military force (as Americans would learn in Baghdad in the 21st century) actually raised tensions, radicalized the populace and caused conflict.

Besides, seizing centralized armories would not, in itself, work in America, due to one characteristic of the colonists: They were armed. Consider, for a moment, the radical ramifications of an armed populace. The Americans were unique in that, unlike Englishmen, Scots or Irishmen, nearly all white men were gun owners. The tools, so to speak, were there. It seemed war would come eventually; it was a matter of when and where.

At about 4 a.m. on April 19, 1775, the British regulars, on the road to Concord, ran into a paltry, colonial show of force: 70 or so militiamen had gathered—with muskets—on the Lexington town green. A British officer ordered them to disperse. They did not. No one knows who fired first, but it was the seasoned British regulars who fired last, at least for the moment. When the smoke cleared, several colonists—English subjects—lay dead, more were wounded, and the rest had fled. The road to Concord lay open, and the British took it.

Then, on the way back to their base in Boston, something happened. Colonists from neighboring towns, using hit-and-run tactics on home turf they knew thoroughly, inflicted hundreds of casualties on the withdrawing British redcoats. It was a bloody day, and it changed the course of American history.

After Lexington and Concord, both sides sought to use the day’s events as propaganda to drum up support. Both told lies. Some colonists claimed that marauding redcoats had slaughtered women and children in their path. For their part, some Britons told tales of rebel colonists scalping—and in some cases cannibalizing—surrendered prisoners.

And so, as is often the case, matters after this first draw of blood took on a chaotic momentum. Many formerly lukewarm patriots from the other, less zealous colonies now stood with their firebrand cousins in rebellious Massachusetts. It was to be war. A war among, and for, the loyalty of the people—the sort of war that doesn’t end well.

“The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill,” circa 1815, by John Trumbull.

The conflict centered in Boston for the next several months, and the once overconfident British learned their lesson again in the famous Battle of Bunker Hill (which was actually fought on Breed’s Hill) in June 1775. Observe the painting above, like the Cornwallis painting the work of John Trumbull, essentially the official artist of the Continental Army. In this romanticized depiction, which has become visual gospel of the patriot cause, the brutal Brits—accompanied by dark clouds—charge the hill and attempt to bayonet a dying Gen. Joseph Warren. Warren, of course, is clad in virgin white and lies in the Christlike lamentation pose so popular in paintings of the time.

In the battle the attacking British chose a frontal assault, rather than Gen. Henry Clinton’s preferred flanking maneuver, and eventually dislodged the colonists. In a sense the British won—they held the field—but it was a pyrrhic victory. More than 1,000 British and 400 Americans were killed or wounded. Though it occurred just two months after the fighting commenced, Bunker Hill would prove to be the bloodiest single-day encounter of the entire war.

This, before the colonies had even declared independence! Indeed, that was to come much later, some 13 months afterward, in July 1776. Just one month after the combatants soaked Breed’s Hill with blood, the colonists sent the famous “Olive Branch” petition to King George III, seeking a negotiated solution to the conflict. Most colonists still viewed themselves as both American and British. Few expected outright detachment from the empire. Only the timing was poor. The king, having received word of the bloodshed in Boston, ignored the petition and instead declared the colonies in rebellion in August 1775. The king may, in fact, have passed up an opportunity to de-escalate the rebellion and divide the colonists. Instead, the patriots among them moved irrevocably toward independence.

The Decision for Independence, the Issue of God-Given Equality

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

—Thomas Jefferson (1776) and Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh (1945)

It was in these fiery times, after Lexington/Concord and Bunker Hill, that Thomas Paine penned “Common Sense.” This wildly popular tract—it sold 100,000 copies in a single year, estimated to be the equivalent of 12 million copies today—was concise and accessible, written in a plain language that spoke to a widely literate American population. In a sense, Paine was a strange messenger for 18th-century colonists. A Briton who had recently arrived in America, Paine had, until January 1776, largely been a failure. And, for the times (heck, for today!), he was a radical; an atheist who called for abolition of slavery and an early form of universal health care, Paine had one more seemingly radical idea: American independency.

Paine’s “Common Sense” described the logic of division from Great Britain and dramatically extolled the virtue of the American Cause:

There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy … so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king … but there is something very absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.

The Cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind. … The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. … We have it in our power to begin the world over again. …

Wow. What it did, besides motivate the patriots, was to logically bridge the gap to a declaration of full independence from the British Empire. Within months, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia would come to the same conclusion, and a young Virginian planter—and slaveholder—named Thomas Jefferson would be nominated to pen the proclamation.

What sort of document was this? For one thing, the decision to write it was itself radical. This was, at root, an act of treason to which dozens of men courageously signed their names. It was a lengthy list of grievances against the king himself, an explanation for their decision to rebel. But it is the document’s preamble that we remember, and this, of course, was a thorny matter. The preamble speaks of all men being created equal, and certainly the Founding Fathers did not mean to extend political rights to women. But which men? White ones, of course, perhaps with a little property, or, in the more progressive colonies, perhaps even the landless. Slaves or free black men (one-fifth of the population) didn’t count; nor did the “savage” Native Americans beyond the Appalachian frontier. A simple, and not altogether incorrect, conclusion would be that the Declaration of Independence was, at root, a hypocritical document. But there is much more to it.

The preamble and main prose of the declaration tells us many things. Here is one: This was a war about ideas more than territory, and ideological wars tend to be long and brutal in their prosecution. It is—as I’ve learned firsthand across the contemporary Middle East—a very difficult thing indeed to defeat an enemy fighting fundamentally for ideas.

The attribution of the quotation I used at the start of this subsection is shared by Jefferson and Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese revolutionary communist and sworn enemy of the United States. Ho directly quoted the line from Jefferson’s preamble in his own declaration of independence, from the French Empire in 1945. I included Ho because he serves a purpose: to demonstrate that the meaning and interpretation of words and sentiments change through the ages. A non-Christian Asian would certainly have found himself excluded from the fruits of America’s 18th-century revolution. And yet, perceiving a universalism in the document’s preface, Ho was inspired by Jefferson’s words nearly two centuries later. This, perhaps, is the American Revolution as its imperfect best.

The Civil War of 1776: Loyalists and Patriots in Revolution

“Upon the whole, if we allow [at most] two-thirds of the people to have been with us in the revolution, is not the allowance ample? Divided we have ever been, and ever must be.”

—John Adams (1813)

Benjamin Franklin was, perhaps, along with George Washington, the most famed and avowed patriot of them all. For all that, Franklin’s own family divided over the revolution, and one of his most avowed critics was his own son: the royal governor of New Jersey and a staunch loyalist. If even the Franklin family could tear asunder in the tide of revolution, then certainly something profound was afoot in the colonies.

In addition to being a war for independence, the American Revolution was, and at the time often was referred to as, an American civil war. This was a revolutionary war in the most basic sense, full of armies, guerrillas, militias, local strongmen and counterinsurgents. While quite 18th century in its flavor and makeup, it was not unlike contemporary events in Iraq or Syria. Though rarely thought of in this way, as a proportion of the population nearly as many Americans fought one another in the Revolution as in the Civil War of 1861-65.

To understand this, one must consider the extent and power of loyalism of one stripe or another. A bit of mental math is in order. We’ll stick with the men. Let us assume that 50 percent of white men were patriots. The fifth of the population that was black mainly sided with the British. That takes our calculation of patriots down to only 40 percent of the male population, and, of course, that excludes the Native Americans (who were, admittedly, not considered in colonial censuses), who were also, as we’ll find, generally allied with the British. In other words, whether in the lead-up to or in the midst of the revolution, the male patriots probably did not constitute a majority.

We often imagine the loyalists to the British cause to have been ultraconservative aristocrats, but in reality they came from all social ranks, classes and races and had varied levels of devotion to the imperial cause.

There were many reasons to remain loyal: devotion to king and crown, business connections with the imperial bureaucracy, caution, apathy and, sometimes, frustration with the excesses of the patriot masses. We must remember that no more than half the (white) colonists were outright patriots. Yet rebel crowds (or mobs, depending on one’s point of view) from that fraction took it upon themselves to not just protest but take up arms, to engage in acts of violence and, frankly, to enforce adherence to their own cause. This drew the ire of many a loyalist—or even neutral—observer. Consider a brilliant satire penned by New York loyalists in 1774 and titled “At a Meeting of the True Sons of Liberty.” The authors mock the patriot penchant for dramatic proclamations and list 15 farcical “resolutions.” The 15th, and final, is instructive:

RESOLVED, lastly, that every Man, Woman, or Child, who doth not agree with our Sentiments, whether he, she, or they, understand them or not, is an Enemy to his Country, wheresoever he was born … and that he ought at least to be tarred and feathered, if not hanged, drawn and quartered; all Statutes, Laws and Ordinances whatsoever to the contrary notwithstanding.

The loyalists and the many fence sitters—the latter group surely had sizable numbers—found the patriots exhausting and intrusive. Some took up arms for the British cause, others disseminated loyalist pamphlets and many held their tongues until it was all over.

Often, neutrality or conscientious loyalism was seen by the patriots as unacceptable. With British regulars pinned down and concentrated by the mere existence of Washington’s Continental Army, patriot militias policed allegiance to the rebellion in unoccupied towns and villages. It is not that there weren’t plenty of loyalists; it’s that the British always overestimated the number prepared to throw in their lot militarily with the fleeting, ever-on-the-move British army. By trying hard to raise such loyalist units, the British ended up fomenting a civil war, while lacking the troop numbers and mobility to back their colonial allies in the distant cities and hamlets.

Even in the South, where it was believed (correctly, to some extent) that loyalism ran strong, the British could only capture territory and then move on, leaving the task of securing it to local loyalists. Consider it an “Americanization” strategy on par with the U.S. Army’s “Vietnamization” strategy in the Vietnam War, in which U.S. forces sought to hand off territory and responsibility to their local allies in South Vietnam. Once the British (or, later, the U.S. military in Vietnam) left an area, trouble arose in the rear as rebel terrorism was often met by loyalist retaliation as a cycle of civil war gathered its own chaotic inertia.

Brutal it was, and bloody it could be, but it might have been much worse. Part of the ultimate explanation for British defeat must lie with the generals’ decision—as gentlemen—not to unleash many of the most vicious and violent loyalist militias on the patriot populace in a sort of total war. The British, even late in the war, continued to see the colonists as misguided countrymen and hoped at some point to reconcile, not shatter, American society.

Still, in the South in particular, the addition—as we shall see in next week’s installment—of revolting slaves into the civil maelstrom ushered in the nastiest phase of the war. More Americans died in this communal aspect of the conflict than in British-American conventional battles. Indeed, in the Deep South, the Continental Army had serious recruiting troubles, as Southern patriots were more concerned with policing and protecting against rebellious slaves than in directly fighting for the gallant cause of American independence.

What, then, are we to make of these other, forgotten Americans: the slaves, the Indians, the women? How did they perceive this revolution or, more aptly, this civil war? Our next installment will deal with these questions and ponder an issue at the center of the conflict: Exactly whose revolution was it?

* * *

Normally, installments in “American History for Truthdiggers” appear at two-week intervals. However, next Saturday Truthdig will publish an article by Danny Sjursen completing his treatment of the American Revolutionary War. Subsequently, postings will return to the original schedule of every other Saturday.

* * *

To learn more about topics in the above article, consider the following scholarly works:

● James West Davidson, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle and Michael B. Stoff, “Experience History: Interpreting America’s Past,” Chapter 7: “The American Revolution, 1775-1783” (2011).

● Alfred Young and Gregory Nobles, “Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding” (2011).

● Edward Countryman, “The American Revolution” (1985).

● Gary B. Nash, “The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America” (2005).

● John Shy, “A People Numerous & Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence,” revised edition (1990).

● Jill Lepore, “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History” (2010).

Maj. Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast, “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

[The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

Court: Detained Immigrant Teens Must Have Abortion Access

WASHINGTON—A federal court has told the Trump administration that the government can’t interfere with the ability of pregnant immigrant teens being held in federal custody to obtain abortions.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued an order Friday evening barring the government from “interfering with or obstructing” pregnant minors’ access to abortion counseling or abortions, among other things, while a lawsuit proceeds. The order covers pregnant minors being held in federal custody after entering the country illegally.

Lawyers for the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for sheltering children who illegally enter the country unaccompanied by a parent, have said the department has a policy of “refusing to facilitate” abortions. And the director of the office that oversees the shelters has said he believes teens in his agency’s care have no constitutional right to abortion.

The American Civil Liberties Union brought a lawsuit on behalf of the minors, which Chutkan also Friday allowed to go forward as a class action lawsuit.

“We have been able to secure justice for these young pregnant women in government custody who will no longer be subject to the government’s policy of coercion and obstruction while the case continues,” said ACLU attorney Brigitte Amiri after the judge’s order became public.

The government can appeal the order. A Department of Justice spokesman didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment Friday evening.

The health department said in a statement Saturday that it “strongly maintains that taxpayers are not responsible for facilitating the abortion of unaccompanied minors who entered the country illegally and are currently in the government’s care.” It said it is “working closely with the Justice Department to review the court’s order and determine next steps.”

The ACLU and Trump administration have been sparring for months over the government’s policy. In a high-profile case last year, the ACLU represented a teen who entered the U.S. illegally in September and learned while in federal custody in Texas that she was pregnant.

The teen, referred to in court paperwork as Jane Doe, obtained a state court order permitting her to have an abortion and secured private funding to pay for it, but federal officials refused to transport her or temporarily release her so that others could take her to get the procedure.

The teen was ultimately able to get an abortion in October as a result of the lawsuit, but the Trump administration has accused the ACLU of misleading the government during the case, a charge the ACLU has denied.

The ACLU has since represented several other teens who have sought abortions while in custody, but the organization doesn’t know of any others actively seeking abortions, Amiri said Friday night. The judge’s order now covers any teens currently in custody or who come in to custody while the lawsuit goes forward.

In a deposition taken in December as part of the litigation, Scott Lloyd, the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors, said pregnant teens in his agency’s care have no right to abortion under the Constitution. Lloyd, who has written about his own opposition to abortion, said he had not approved any abortions since becoming director in March 2017. That included refusing the abortion request of a teen who had been impregnated as a result of rape.

Chutkan said in the ruling Friday that Lloyd and his office are “certainly entitled to maintain an interest in fetal life” and even to prefer that pregnant minors in their custody “choose one course over the other,” but the government can’t create or implement a policy that strips minors “of their right to make their own reproductive choices.” Chutkan was appointed by President Barack Obama.

What Would Martin Luther King Do?

In March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson—who had successfully launched important voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives—under pressure from the military decided to send additional troops to join the more than half a million already in Vietnam. There they would fight and eventually lose a war that cost the United States $100 billion. That same month, the bipartisan Kerner Commission, appointed by Johnson in 1967 in response to riots in dozens of American cities, concluded that a massive national investment, estimated at $80 billion to $100 billion in employment, education, welfare and housing, was essential to prevent our nation from becoming “two societies, one black and one white—separate and unequal.” The commission briefly considered recommending reducing and reallocating resources from the war in Vietnam but decided that would be too controversial.

Fearing the political costs of losing the war in Vietnam and facing deepening racial division and white backlash at home, Johnson ignored the Kerner Commission report and, in a televised address to the nation on March 31, announced he would not seek a second term as president. Five days later, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr., who had praised the Kerner report, was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., where he had gone to support the struggle of striking sanitation workers.

A year earlier, in his famous Riverside Church sermon, “A Time to Break Silence,” which he delivered on April 4, 1967, King carefully—yet controversially—explained why he opposed the Vietnam War, in part because of U.S. support for France keeping Vietnam as a colony. He spoke about the triple threats of racism, poverty and militarism. Reflecting his view that the war threatened Johnson’s “Great Society” initiatives, King declared, “There was hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program, then came the buildup in Vietnam.”

Had he lived, there is little doubt that King would have opposed the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not only based on his principled commitment to nonviolence and against war, but because, like the Vietnam War, these wars have robbed our nation of essential human and economic resources, estimated so far at more than $4 trillion—resources as desperately needed today as they were 50 years ago to address problems of poverty, racism and growing inequality.

On the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report, several publications reported on some progress over the past five decades but also catalogued conditions that have remained the same or gotten worse. Among the most revealing and troubling indicators is that, while the overall percentage of Americans living in poverty has remained about the same since 1968, the percentage of American children living in poverty and the percentage of people living in “deep poverty” (on incomes less than half the poverty level) have both increased. Shockingly, the United States has one of the highest rates of child poverty of any developed country. While percentages of black and Hispanic children in poverty are higher than those of whites, one-third of all American children living in poverty are white.

Fred Harris, the sole surviving member of the Kerner Commission, and Alan Curtis, president and CEO of the Eisenhower Foundation, have edited a new book, “Healing Our Divided Society,” an updated review of the challenges our country faces and what can be done. The book includes two dozen articles by prominent economists, educators, journalists, sociologists and others, with recommendations for major national investments in economic development, employment, education, health care, housing and neighborhoods. It includes critical articles addressing crime prevention, criminal justice policy and the need for effective messaging to engage the media, something the Kerner Commission failed to do 50 years ago.

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Clearly, substantial investments also are needed to address the national opioid crisis, the challenge of global warming and the rebuilding of the country’s infrastructure. This Eisenhower Foundation book is even more convincing and useful because it includes several evidence-based essays documenting which federal programs actually have worked, which ones haven’t, and why.

Where this book fails is in not addressing our country’s exceptionally high level of military spending (roughly half of the federal government’s discretionary spending) and factors in U.S. foreign policy that, since the end of World War II, have gotten our country into wars we later regret. Currently, U.S. military spending is higher than that of the next eight countries combined. Ironically, the Eisenhower Foundation book totally ignores President Dwight Eisenhower’s wise moral insight that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

President Donald Trump and his new national security adviser, John Bolton, who seems eager to get us into more wars, want to increase military spending and decrease spending on social needs.

There is no use pretending: If we are serious about healing our divided society as King envisioned, we need a revolution in our cultural values and a radical shift in our national priorities, away from violence and militarism and toward nonviolence and effective policies and programs to meet people’s real needs for living wage employment, housing, health care and education. Recent mass marches led by women and young people, combined with voter registration campaigns, offer hope that our country can make the right critical choices.

Young Nobelist Visits Town Where She Was Shot in 2012

MINGORA, Pakistan—Pakistan’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai on Saturday arrived in her hometown for the first time since a Taliban militant shot her there in 2012 for advocating girls’ education.

Yousafzai and her family arrived in a helicopter provided by the Pakistani military, which took her to the town of Mingora in the Swat Valley from Islamabad. She had arrived in the capital before dawn on Thursday flanked by heavy security and plans to return to Britain on Monday.

Yousafzai, 20, won international renown after she was shot by the Taliban in Mingora. She received initial treatment in Pakistan and later was taken to England for further care. She stayed on in the United Kingdom to continue her education and became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

Yousafzai entered her childhood home Saturday accompanied by her father, mother and brother. She sobbed upon entering the home where relatives, former class fellows and friends had been anxiously waiting since morning to welcome her with flowers and hugs.

Youzafzai said she waited for the moment for more than five years and said she often looked at Pakistan on the map, hoping one day to return. She said she plans to permanently return to Pakistan after completing her studies in Britain.

“It is still like a dream for me, am I among you? Is it a dream or reality,” she said.

Security had been visibly beefed up in Mingora the previous day. The Pakistani Taliban had warned after the attack on the then-14-year-old that they would target her again if they got the chance.

Yousafzai had asked authorities to allow her to go to Mingora and Shangla village in the Swat Valley, where a school has been built by her Malala Fund.

In October 2012, Yousafzai was shot in the head by a Taliban assassin who jumped inside her school van and yelled, “Who is Malala?” She was targeted for speaking out on girls’ education.

Since her attack and recovery, Yousafzai has led the Malala Fund in which she said has invested $6 million for schools and books and uniforms for schoolchildren.

Yousafzai has delighted in telling the Taliban that instead of silencing her, they have amplified her voice. She has also written a book, spoken at the United Nations and met with refugees.

On Friday, Yousafzai praised the Pakistan army in an interview on the independent Geo news channel for providing her timely medical treatment, saying her surgery was done by an army surgeon at the “right time.”

Yousafzai has won praise from across Pakistan on her return home, but some critics on social media have tried to undermine her efforts to promote girls’ education. Yousafzai told media outlets Friday that she expected criticism from militants, who had a particular mindset, but doesn’t understand why some educated Pakistanis oppose her.

“Those who do criticize have an absurd kind of criticism that doesn’t make any sense,” she said in an interview with Pakistan’s The News English-language newspaper published Saturday.

“What I want is for people to support my purpose of education and think about the daughters of Pakistan who need an education,” she told the newspaper. “Don’t think about me. I don’t want any favor or I don’t want everyone to accept me. All I care about is that they accept education as an issue.”

In the interview, she said she was sitting in her classroom when news broke about her Nobel Prize and that she was not aware of it as she was not using her mobile phone at the time.

“My teacher came into my classroom and called me outside. I was worried that I might have done something wrong and I am in trouble. But she told me that I had won the Peace Prize. I said thank you. You don’t know how to respond. For me, it was for the cause of education,” she told the paper.

___

Ahmed reported from Islamabad.

Can Presidents Be Sued for Malpractice?

You can’t make this stuff up: President Trump has announced he will nominate a medical doctor who has no discernible management experience to run the second-largest agency in the federal government.

Can presidents be sued for malpractice?

The man Trump has named to

Black Parkland Students Air Concerns About Campus Police

A group of black students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., held a press conference Wednesday to call attention to their unique safety concerns. About 11 percent of the school’s students are black, but they have not been as present as their white classmates in national news coverage of the shooting and the wave of activism it inspired.

A group of Black students from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High called a press conference today to say they have concerns that may not mirror those of their white peers. And that the media should listen. #MSDStrong pic.twitter.com/f3iy85Szi7

— Nadege C. Green (@NadegeGreen) March 28, 2018

The Root reports:

At a press conference they organized, black students told reporters that they felt left out of the conversations on gun violence that have followed in the wake of the February shooting. And some safety measures that have been put in place at Stoneman Douglas High—namely, an increased police presence on campus—have left them feeling in more danger. …

The students made clear that they didn’t want to detract from the work their white peers were doing, but wanted the conversation around gun violence to be more inclusive of concerns around police violence.

As Truthdig columnist Sonali Kolhatkar points out in her column this week, black Americans are eight times more likely to be killed by firearms than those who are white, and they are disproportionately affected by police violence. Kolhatkar also lauded the students who organized the March for Our Lives for their inclusive approach, saying that they “did a far better job of centering the voices of people of color than the mainstream media did.”

But the students at Wednesday’s press conference expressed concern that in the aftermath of the shooting, increasing police presence at their predominantly white school could lead to them being unfairly targeted. Seventeen-year-old Kai Koerber said that more law enforcement on campus could lead to him and other black students being treated like “potential criminals.”

“It’s bad enough we have to return with clear backpacks,” he said. “Should we also return with our hands up?”

WLRN reporter Nadege Green tweeted about the event, capturing footage of 17-year-old Tyah-Amoy Roberts, who reitereated that “black and brown men and women are disproportionately targeted and killed by law enforcement. These are not facts I can live with comfortably.”

Tyah-Amoy a Marjorie Stoneman Douglas student said conversations about gun violence have to include police violence. She asked, the same people who showed up for #MarchForOurLives–will they show up for #StephonClark? #AltonSterling? #SandraBland? pic.twitter.com/QIhvy9gYHD

— Nadege C. Green (@NadegeGreen) March 28, 2018

The Rev. Rosalina Osgood, a member of the Broward County School Board, told the Miami Herald that she doesn’t want students of color “to be angry and feel that they’re being ignored.”

“I don’t think anybody’s intentionally excluding them, but nobody’s intentionally including them, either,” she said.

Autopsy: Police Shot Stephon Clark 7 Times From Behind

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Sacramento police shot Stephon Clark seven times from behind, according to autopsy results released Friday by a pathologist hired by Clark’s family. The finding calls into question the department’s assertion the 22-year-old black man was facing officers and moving toward them when he was killed.

Dr. Bennet Omalu, whose study of a degenerative brain condition in football players prompted the NFL to adopt new safety rules designed to prevent concussions, also determined Clark took three to 10 minutes to die. Police waited about five minutes before rendering medical aid.

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“The proposition that has been presented that he was assailing the officers, meaning he was facing the officers, is inconsistent with the prevailing forensic evidence,” Omalu said at a news conference with family attorney Benjamin Crump.

He said it was not clear if Clark would have survived had he gotten immediate medical attention.

Sacramento police responded with a brief statement that said the department had not yet received an official autopsy report from the Sacramento County coroner’s office. It said the coroner’s death investigation is independent from the investigation being conducted by police and the state Department of Justice.

A day after the March 18 shooting, police distributed a press release that said the officers who shot Clark “saw the suspect facing them, advance forward with his arms extended, and holding an object in his hands.”

Police video of the shooting doesn’t clearly capture all that happened after Clark ran into his grandmother’s backyard. He initially moved toward the officers, who are peeking out from behind a corner of the house, but it’s not clear he’s facing them or that he knows they are there when they open fire after shouting “gun, gun, gun.”

After 20 shots, officers call to him, apparently believing he might still be alive and armed. They eventually approach and find no gun, just a cellphone.

The shooting has produced almost daily angry but peaceful protests in the downtown area of California’s capital city. The autopsy heightened calls for justice and skepticism toward police among community activists.

“Generally speaking, part of the outrage in the community is not only for this shooting but it’s for all police shootings that are happening of unarmed people,” said Dale Galipo, another Clark family lawyer. One of the big questions we all have to ask is: ‘What do we need to do for these shooting to stop?'”

Black Lives Matter Sacramento planned a protest Friday night outside City Hall and other actions were possible.

“You’ll probably see a little bit of everything,” said Berry Accius, a community activist. “But that’s not for me to say, it’s for the people to decide.”

Police were called to the South Sacramento neighborhood on March 18 after a neighbor reported someone was breaking car windows. A police helicopter identified a suspect, who ran as police on the ground gave chase.

The helicopter video shows the two officers at the corner of Clark’s grandmother’s house and Clark on the backyard patio. He moves toward the officers’ position as they peer around the corner and open fire.

Clark staggers sideways and falls on his stomach as officers continue shooting.

Omalu said any of the six bullets that hit Clark in the back and one in the neck could have been the fatal shot. An eighth bullet went into Clark’s thigh.

The autopsy was released a day after an emotional funeral service. The Rev. Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy and praised demonstrators for their restraint and urged them to follow the lead of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his advocacy of nonviolent protest.

Later in the day, police in riot gear stood waiting outside the Golden 1 Center as fans wove through barricades and fencing to enter a Sacramento Kings-Indiana Pacers game. Twice since the shooting, demonstrators had blocked thousands of fans from entering the area.

But protesters never came to the arena Thursday night, heeding calls from Clark’s brother, Stevante Clark, and Black Lives Matter organizers to avoid the arena.

Instead, they blocked rush hour traffic on nearby downtown streets.

The Kings and their owner have supported the family.

Players Vince Carter, Garrett Temple and Doug Christie, a retired player, plan to appear Friday night at a youth forum staged as part of a new partnership with the Build Black Coalition and Black Lives Matter Sacramento to increase education and workforce training for black youth. Former Kings player Matt Barnes attended the funeral and helped pay for it.

___

Associated Press reporters Kathleen Ronayne and Haven Daley in Sacramento, John Antczak and Brian Melley in Los Angeles contributed.

The March We Need Is a March for Peace

Students march for gun control; women march for a variety of causes, and, well, against anything Trump; but who is marching for less American war in the Greater Middle East?

Why? Why isn’t there a passionate coalition willing to combat the American war machine? A machine that is, by now, on autopilot.

This weekend, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched to protest gun violence; in January, hundreds thousands of women – and their supporters – staged a second annual protest against all things Trump. Leaving aside the relative merits of each issue, the sheer number of marchers physically descending on various cities, rather than engaging in far easier social media activism, is impressive. Right or wrong in their convictions, these citizens, exercising their First Amendment rights, made this author proud…and then sad.

Sad because of what I know: that there is no constituency of any comparable size ready or willing to march against the single greatest disease in 21st century American society – creeping militarism and endless foreign war. As I write this, on a Sunday morning, I’m certain the key weekly television programs – “Meet the Press,” “This Week,” and “Face the Nation” – will focus on, at best, three issues. First: Russia-gate, the Left’s favorite daily soap opera; Second: gun violence, the NRA, and a nation divided over firearms; and, if we’re lucky, Third: the John Bolton appointment and the potential for a future war in Iran.

You can bet there will be hardly any mention of Yemen, Niger, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, or Afghanistan – seven of the countries in which Americans have killed and been killed in the last year. There will be no cost-benefit analysis or discussions about which conflict – if any – is in America’s vital, national interest. There will be no nationwide antiwar protests to cover, no dissenting veterans interviewed, no investigative reporters on the ground with disgruntled local civilians in a Mideast locale. No, the Sunday shows will be all about politics, or at least what passes for political discourse these days, and, of course, the ongoing national culture wars.

These are, mind you, important issues. Nonetheless, the relative silence regarding America’s seven – at least – ongoing shooting wars is itself instructive. No one cares. Military intervention, bombing, even the occasional dead servicemen – how many readers even know there were seven killed in Iraq this past week? – hardly register in the news cycle. War is the new normal. Young people know nothing else. A junior in high school, marching against guns violence this weekend, was likely born in 2002 – he or she has never known peace. In each year of that young student’s life, at least scores – and usually many hundreds – of U.S. troops have been killed fighting indecisive, barely reported, wars in the Greater Middle East.

Without a draft, and with taxes as a percent of GDP trending downward rather than up, most Americans are hardly touched directly by the forever war. A shrinking, familial, warrior caste fights in these ill-advised, unsatisfying contests, and will do so until, inevitably, they are brought to an indecisive conclusion. Their thanks comes in the form of airport adulation, minor discounts at the local Texas Roadhouse, and excessive verbal expressions of gratitude. We thank our troopers, then we ignore them and retreat, inevitably, back to our post-Trumpian political battle stations to fight the wars at home: the culture wars.

Still, it is a new protest march that the republic requires. A march for peace, maybe, or at least a march demanding de-escalation and prudent policy in the Middle East. Let us have no illusions: terrorism will continue, Islamist extremism must run its course, and the Levant will remain an ugly place. The term “peace,” may even be inadequate for these times. Nevertheless, the citizenry must march, must protest, if it wishes to send a message to their deerelict-in-their-duty congressmen: no more unnecessary war in our name.

Every protest needs an enemy. Lobbyists tend to make excellent villains. So do individual politicians. The students believe they’re combating the NRA; the women, well, they hate Trump. Who, then, would our imaginary marchers do battle with? Here’s an idea: the military-industrial-congressional complex. Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and the representatives they pay off in Washington; the 55 cowardly senators who just this week refused to even allow a vote on US complicity in the horrific war in Yemen. The liberals among the protesters could call out the ten Democrats who joined with the Republican majority to tacitly lend approval to Saudi terror bombing in Yemen: bombing which could not continue, mind you, absent extensiveAmerican military support in the way of U.S.-supplied munitions, U.S.-supplied intelligence, and U.S.-supplied in-flight refueling.

The marchers would need to think strategically and avoid platitudes and words sure to trigger alienation on both sides of the political spectrum. They’d have to take the world as it is and recognize the US military will continue to have (a very limited) counter terror role in an undoubtedly dangerous world. But the protesters’ arguments would be simple and nearly incontestable: that the only remaining vital US national security interest in the Mideast is transnational terror.

Times have changed. The old interests no longer jive with existing realities. Deterring Soviet power in the Persian Gulf is oh so 1980s; securing access to oil resources is so 1990s or 2000s. Russia, even at its Putinian worst, is decidedly not the Soviet Union. Furthermore, a combination of renewable energy options and new domestic hydrocarbon resources are changing the calculus of Mideast oil politics. Still, nothing has changed in the US military posture in the region. Consider it the American inertia strategy: more interventions, more troops, more bombs, more…everything.

The protesters I’m imaging would rally around two simple foreign policy demands: do less and be consistent. For 17 years now, the US has doubled down on hyper-interventionism, despite the obviously counterproductive results – there are more worldwide terror attacks and more Islamist groups now then there were at the outset of the foolishly declared “war on terror.” The US has also lost any and all credibility on the “Arab street.” That shouldn’t surprise us: we’re oh so inconsistent in the region.

The US talks talks peace, liberty, and freedom but remains the world’s largestarms dealer. Some 49% of all US sales go to the Mideast, including to absolute monarchies (think the Saudis), autocrats (think Sisi in Egypt), and Islamist-allied militias (think the messy Syrian “opposition”). This isn’t solely a Trump problem, either; arms sales exploded under Barack Obama, though the current president does appear to be doubling down.

So here’s the rub: US military action, the outright killing and dying it does in at least seven states of the Greater Middle East, along with the arms sale bonanza the Mil-Industrial Complex profits from, have not made us any safer.

According to the comprehensive, Brown University Costs of War project, some 7,000 US servicemen and women have died since 9/11. Their numbers pale in comparison to the upwards of 200,000 civilians killed in the wars of choice that Washington unleashed on a fragile region. The blood, much of it anyway, is on our hands and shed in our name. And, tragically, all that death and destruction hasn’t made the US, or the world, a safer place. Yet, on the wars go; where they’ll stop? Nobody knows.

That sounds like something worth marching about.

9th Circuit Court Judge Stephen Reinhardt Dies at 87

Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals died Thursday of a heart attack at age 87, a court spokesperson said. Reinhardt, a Jimmy Carter appointee, was known as the “liberal lion” of the federal circuit courts. His death creates a vacancy in the judiciary for the Trump administration to fill.

Reinhardt’s history as a judge was indeed left-leaning. He joined another judge in ruling that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance were unconstitutional (a decision that was later overturned). He also ruled that laws prohibiting physician-assisted suicide were unconstitutional, as well as prison overcrowding in California. He was part of a three-judge panel in 2012 that struck down California’s Proposition 8, which eliminated the right of the state’s same-sex couples to marry.

“All parties agree that Proposition 8 had one effect only,” he wrote. “It stripped same-sex couples of the ability they previously had possessed to obtain from the state, or any other authorized party, an important right—the right to obtain and use the designation of ‘marriage’ to describe their relationships. Nothing more, nothing less.”

According to the Los Angeles Times:

His rulings in favor of criminal defendants, minorities and immigrants were often overturned by the more conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

Many lawyers have joked that Reinhardt’s name on a ruling was probably enough to get the attention of the conservatives on the Supreme Court. In 1996, after Reinhardt was reversed several times by the Supreme Court, The Times asked him if he was upset.

“Not in the slightest!” he boomed. “If they want to take away rights, that’s their privilege. But I’m not going to help them do it.”

No matter how many reversals he endured, Reinhardt used the bench to try to help the underdog. Just a few months ago, he called The Times to read a reporter a letter from a woman who had just been released from prison and who wanted to thank him for ruling in her favor.

Erwin Chemerinsky, University of California at Berkeley law school dean, said, “He was a giant not just on the 9th Circuit but within the law. He also was a judge with a particular vision of the law, based on enforcing the Constitution to protect people.”

Thomas Saenz, a former clerk under Reinhardt and president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called the judge a “powerful force for what is good and righteous in a court system that too often strays from the path of justice.”

Truthdig columnist Bill Blum added:

They don’t make judges like Reinhardt anymore, at least not on the left. Where others are timid and tentative, he was bold, innovative and completely unafraid. I got to know him not only from afar as an attorney interested in advancing civil rights and protecting civil liberties, but up close as a writer, penning a 2003 cover story about him for California Lawyer magazine, titled “The Last Liberal.” I closed that article with a quote from him that I will never forget:

“‘My theory about life,” Reinhardt told me, “is that we live in an evolutionary world—society progresses gradually toward enlightenment. But it doesn’t necessarily move in a steady line. There are up periods and down periods. The fact that we’re in a down period at the moment doesn’t mean that progress has stopped.'”

I may be a little naive, but even after all these years, I still agree with him. The great tragedy now is not only that Reinhardt has passed away, but that Donald Trump will get to name his successor.

Reinhardt was openly critical of the Trump administration. In 2017, when the 9th Circuit refused to rehear the travel ban case, he said, “I am proud to be a part of this court and a judicial system that is independent and courageous, and that vigorously protects the constitutional rights of all, regardless of the source of any efforts to weaken or diminish them.”

Reinhardt also spoke against the Trump administration for deporting a coffee farmer who had built a business growing coffee in Hawaii.

In an opinion published by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in May 2017, Reinhardt wrote, “President Trump has claimed that his immigration policies would target the ‘bad hombres.’ The government’s decision to remove [Andres] Magana Ortiz shows that even the ‘good hombres’ are not safe.”