David Swanson's Blog, page 137
August 16, 2013
Manning Sentencing Defense Plays Up Psychological Stress, Fails To Use Whistleblower Defense
August 15, 2013
A New Holiday Is Being Created for Peace
When I wrote When the World Outlawed War, I was struck by the significance of a forgotten day, a day matching the description in the 1950 folk song that begins "Last night I had the strangest dream . . . " On this day, August 27, 1928, the major nations of the world sent representatives to a room in Paris, France, in which they signed a treaty banning war and committing to the peaceful settlement of all disputes.
The treaty they signed, which is still on the books, has been used over the decades to prevent wars, end wars, and prosecute war makers. The Peace Pact is listed as in force on the U.S. State Department website (open the document, scroll to page 454). But, unlike a corporate trade agreement, the Kellogg-Briand Pact is, shall we say, less than strictly adhered to -- or even remembered.
Few people strolling down Kellogg Boulevard in St. Paul, Minnesota, have any idea that it's named for Frank Kellogg or who he was.
They're about to find out.
At 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, August 21, a resolution will be introduced and voted on by the St. Paul City Council. This resolution is being brought forward by Council member David Thune for the purpose of proclaiming August 27, 2013, to be "Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact Day" in celebration of the 85th anniversary of the signing.
Council member Dave Thune's ward includes Kellogg's former house. Thune will be introducing the proclamation at the request of St. Paul residents, including members of the Minneapolis-St. Paul chapter of Veterans For Peace. The Kellogg-Briand Pact "renounces war as an instrument of National Policy" which is the exact wording found in the (more recently created) Statement of Purpose of Veterans For Peace.
Here is the resolution that is being introduced:
Whereas Frank Billings Kellogg has rightly been honored around the world, including with a Nobel Peace Prize presented to him in 1930,
Whereas Frank Kellogg is honored in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where his ashes lie, and where the Kellogg window in the Kellogg Bay bears these words: "In grateful memory of Frank Billings Kellogg, LL.D., 1856-1937, Senator of the United States from Minnesota, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Secretary of State, a Judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice, Joint Author of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in Fidelity to American Ideals he served his nation with conspicuous ability and sought equity and peace among the nations of the world, his body rests in this cathedral,"
Whereas Frank Kellogg's family moved to Minnesota in 1865 and Kellogg moved to St. Paul in 1886, and Kellogg's home from 1899 to 1937 was the house at 633 Fairmont Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is now a National Historic Landmark,
Whereas Frank Kellogg's name is remembered in St. Paul as the name of Kellogg Boulevard, but memory of what Kellogg did to merit such honors is fading,
Whereas Frank Kellogg as U.S. Secretary of State heeded the passionate and almost universal desire of the people of this and other nations for peace, and in particular the proposal of the Outlawry Movement to legally ban war,
Whereas Frank Kellogg surprised his State Department staff and many others in 1927 by working carefully and diligently to bring many of the world's nations together to ban war,
Whereas war had not previously been a crime, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact made it one, resulting in a nearly complete end to the legal recognition of territorial gains made through war, and resulting in the prosecution following World War II of the new crime of making war,
Whereas the wealthy well-armed nations of the world have not gone to war with each other since those prosecutions -- the elimination of war upon and among the world's poorer nations remaining an important goal toward which greater recognition of the Kellogg-Briand Pact might contribute,
Whereas the Kellogg-Briand Pact is recognized as in force by the U.S. State Department with 84 nations currently parties to it, and the pact open to any other nations that choose to join,
Whereas the Pact, excluding formalities and procedural matters, reads in full, "The High Contracting Parties solemly [sic] declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another. The High Contracting Parties agree that settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means,"
Whereas compliance with the law is more likely to occur if we remember what the law is,
Whereas then French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand remarked at the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact on August 27, 1928: "For the first time, on a scale as absolute as it is vast, a treaty has been truly devoted to the very establishment of peace, and has laid down laws that are new and free from all political considerations. Such a treaty means a beginning and not an end. . . . [S]elfish and willful war which has been regarded from of old as springing from divine right, and has remained in international ethics as an attribute of sovereignty, has been at last deprived by law of what constituted its most serious danger, its legitimacy. For the future, branded with illegality, it is by mutual accord truly and regularly outlawed so that a culprit must indur the unconditional condemnation and probably the hostility of all his co-signatories,"
Therefore, in hopes of encouraging awareness of the work of Frank Kellogg and of the peace movement of the 1920s that moved him to action, the City of St. Paul, Minnesota, proclaims August 27th to be Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact Day.
On August 27th a celebration is planned at the Kellogg house. Meanwhile, in Illinois, an award ceremony is planned for the winners of the first annual essay contest dedicated to the question "How Can We Obey the Law Against War?" But why shouldn't there be celebrations everywhere? Why not recognition for Salmon Oliver Levinson of Chicago, whose movement persuaded Kellogg to act? Why not remembrance of Kellogg in Washington, D.C., where he's buried? Why not celebration of the activists of the 1920s who made up the Outlawry Movement, and who were from every part of the United States and many other nations? Why not a day of celebrating peace and advancing the cause of the abolition of war, including by collectively urging new nations to sign onto the Peace Pact?
Here's a petition that can be signed, and the signatures from any town or state printed out to be used in local lobbying. St. Paul is leading the way, but it need not do so alone. The petition reads:
"We support local, state, national, and international legislation that would make August 27th a holiday in honor of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, also known as the Peace Pact, that was signed on this date in 1928. The International Pact which renounced war as an instrument of national policy and committed nations to settling disputes exclusively by peaceful means was passed into U.S. law in 1929 with only one Senator in opposition. The co-authors were Republican Secretary of State Frank Kellogg from Minnesota and French foreign minister Aristide Briand. Kellogg won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Pact is still U.S. and International Law."
Screaming in Bradley Manning's Trial
I sat in the courtroom all day on Wednesday as Bradley Manning's trial wound its way to a tragic and demoralizing conclusion. I wanted to hear Eugene Debs, and instead I was trapped there, watching Socrates reach for the hemlock and gulp it down. Just a few minutes in and I wanted to scream or shout.
I don't blame Bradley Manning for apologizing for his actions and effectively begging for the court's mercy. He's on trial in a system rigged against him. The commander in chief declared him guilty long ago. He's been convicted. The judge has been offered a promotion. The prosecution has been given a playing field slanted steeply in its favor. Why should Manning not follow the only advice anyone's ever given him and seek to minimize his sentence? Maybe he actually believes that what he did was wrong. But -- wow -- does it make for some perverse palaver in the courtroom.
This was the sentencing phase of the trial, but there was no discussion of what good or harm might come of a greater or lesser sentence, in terms of deterrence or restitution or prevention or any other goal. That's one thing I wanted to scream at various points in the proceedings.
This was the trial of the most significant whistleblower in U.S. history, but there was no mention of anything he'd blown the whistle on, any of the crimes exposed or prevented, wars ended, nonviolent democratic movements catalyzed. Nothing on why he's a four-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Nothing. Every time that the wars went unmentioned, I wanted to scream. War was like air in this courtroom, everybody on all sides militarized -- and it went unnoticed and unmentioned.
What was discussed on Wednesday was as disturbing as what wasn't. Psycho-therapists, and relatives, and Bradley Manning himself -- defense witnesses all -- testified that he had been wrong to do what he'd done, that he'd not been in his right mind, and that he is a likable person to whom the judge should be kind.
Should likable people get lesser sentences?
The prosecution focused, with much less success I think, on depicting Manning as an unlikable person. Should unlikable people get heavier sentences?
What, I wanted to scream, about the likability of blowing the whistle on major crimes? Shouldn't that be rewarded, rather than being less severely punished?
There were some 30 of us observing the trial on Wednesday in the courtroom, many with "TRUTH" on our t-shirts, plus six members of the news media. Another 40 some people were watching a video feed in a trailer outside, and another 40 media folks were watching a video in a separate room. The defense and prosecution lawyers sat a few feet apart from each other, and I suppose the politeness of the operation was preferable to the violence that had led to it. But the gravity of threatening Manning with 90 years in prison seemed belied by the occasional joking with witnesses.
Before he'd become a criminal suspect, Manning had written in an online chat:
"If you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time… say, 8-9 months… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do? . . . or Guantanamo, Bagram, Bucca, Taji, VBC for that matter . . . things that would have an impact on 6.7 billion people . . . say… a database of half a million events during the iraq war… from 2004 to 2009… with reports, date time groups, lat-lon locations, casualty figures… ? or 260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective?"
Manning made clear what his concern and motivation were:
"i think the thing that got me the most… that made me rethink the world more than anything . . . was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing 'anti-Iraqi literature'… the iraqi federal police wouldn't cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the 'bad guys' were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki… i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled 'Where did the money go?' and following the corruption trail within the PM's cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn't want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…"
Manning wanted the public informed:
"its important that it gets out… i feel, for some bizarre reason . . . it might actually change something . . . i just… dont wish to be a part of it… at least not now… im not ready…"
In other words, Manning didn't want his name to be known, but he wanted the information to be known. This was, again, what Manning said during a pre-trial hearing:
" [W]e became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and not being suspicious of and avoiding cooperation with our Host Nation partners, and ignoring the second and third order effects of accomplishing short-term goals and missions. I believe that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A tables this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as [missed word] as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan. I also believed the detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to even to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the effected environment everyday."
Manning wanted to end wars that the majority of Americans think were wrong ever to have begun, and he helped to end them -- at least in the case of Iraq. He'd had clearly thought out intentions, and they led to the sort of success he'd hoped for, at least to some degree. A full-blown public debate on abolishing the institution of war is yet to come.
The first witness on Wednesday was a therapist who had consulted with Manning while he was in the Army and in Iraq. This man noted that Manning had problems with his occupation, but gave no indication of what that occupation was. Manning was under stress, but the moral crisis discussed in the chat logs was never mentioned. Instead, Manning's lawyer directed the witness to discuss "gender issues." The witness said that Manning had informed him that he was gay, that being openly gay in the military was a violation of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice), and that such violations were an exception to doctor-patient confidentiality. Neither defense nor prosecution followed up on that. Nor did they ask whether Manning had mentioned any concerns over other violations of the UCMJ of which he had become aware in the course of his duties. Perhaps not turning Manning in for being gay was simply the decent thing to do. But, then, wasn't Manning's effectively turning others in for their more serious abuses also the decent thing to do?
While I might have liked to see Manning choose a jury rather than a judge, hire a different lawyer, and argue for protection as a whistleblower, the defense's case -- on its own terms -- was well done. The prosecution did not manage to respond effectively or even competently. A prosecutor, referring to comments in a chat log, asked the therapist what it would mean if a soldier called other soldiers ignorant rednecks. The witness replied that he couldn't say that he'd never said such a thing himself. The whole room laughed. I clapped. I forgot for a moment about wanting to scream.
The next witness was a therapist hired to work for the defense. He said that Manning suffered fits of rage in the military. Shouldn't he have? If you'd been dropped into the war on Iraq and seen what it was, how would you have most healthily reacted? This therapist believed Manning suffered from gender dysphoria, or gender identity disorder. The whole room seemed to suffer from basic human decency dysphoria. Manning also suffered, the therapist believed, from fetal alcohol syndrome and Asperger's. Manning also, we were told, suffered from narcissism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. These were related, apparently, to his post-adolescent idealism, a state this therapist considered wide-spread and normal, yet not quite acceptable, as it explained Manning's so-called misdeeds. Manning, we heard, had been stressed out over his boyfriend, and as a result of his alcoholic parents. The notion that war could cause stress didn't enter the courtroom.
Was Manning too stressed to appreciate the wrongness of his actions, his own lawyer asked.
The witness took that question and actually turned the discussion toward Manning's whistleblowing in his answer, suggesting that Manning had found injustices and believed he had an oath to uphold by exposing them. This therapist, however, believed that if Manning had had a friend to talk to, he might not have blown the whistle on anything.
How did stress impact his thought process, asked Manning's lawyer. It impaired it, the therapist explained. Manning suffered from Post-Adolescent Idealism (if only that were contagious! I wanted to scream). Manning underestimated how much trouble he'd be in. The worst he believed could happen to him would be separation from the Army, this expert informed us.
Back in the real world in which Manning had written the messages in the published chat logs that exposed him, Manning had had this to say:
"i wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me… plastered all over the world press… as boy . . . i think im in more potential heat than you ever were [speaking to the snitch who turned him in] . . . Hilary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and finds an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public."
What other impressions did the therapist have of Bradley Manning? Well, Manning had a very consistent system of beliefs.
I wonder if the witness knew what Bradley was going to say on the stand in just a few hours.
The prosecution's cross-examination of the first therapist had been so incompetent that even the judge grew fed-up. This second one was no better. The prosecutor managed to get the witness to talk about Manning's supposed narcissism, grandiosity, arrogance, and haughtiness, but the witness described Post-Adolescent Idealism as so widespread as to be considered normal. (Wouldn't that be nice!)
Did Manning know that what he was doing was illegal, the prosecutor asked. Yes, the therapist said. There was no objection from the defense, of course.
Was personal recognition a motive? No.
Would Manning commit the misconduct again? (This was the only moment that bordered on President Obama's much-beloved looking forward.) I don't know, was the answer.
If in the future he saw something that violated his sense of morality would he take action again? Well, he's been pretty consistent with his principles.
Before Manning reversed his principles on the stand, there was one other witness to testify: Manning's older sister. Her testimony was stunning. I nearly cried. A number of people did openly cry. She described a family in which both parents were alcoholics. Her and Bradley's mother was drunk every day, and a mean drunk at that. Their father was nearly as bad. Manning's sister, 11 years older than he, raised him more than anyone else. Their mother drank through her pregnancy with Bradley. He was tiny and underfed. And things got worse as the parents split up, the mother became suicidal, the sister fled. If this testimony were aired on television, people would discuss it -- in tears -- for many months. There would be endless discussions of each tangential topic, including alcohol, fetal alcohol syndrome, child abuse, rural isolation, divorce, older sisters, and -- of course -- whether traitors can be excused because they had bad childhoods.
And yet, I wanted to scream out: Why aren't we analyzing the people who had better or worse childhoods than Manning and all failed to do what he did? What about their mental health? What about their Blind Obedience Disorder?
Manning's sister said that he had calmed down and matured during the past three years. No mention of his naked isolation cell. No mention of the existential threat hanging over him. No mention of how clear-minded and principled he appears to have been back when he was supposedly immature.
Then, Manning made his sworn statement. He said he was sorry his actions had hurt people, despite no evidence having shown that they did. He said he was sorry his actions hurt the United States, whereas clearly his actions benefitted the United States, allowing us much greater access into what our secretive government is doing in our name. Manning questioned how he could have possibly believed he knew better than his superiors.
It's an interesting question. Manning went into the Army in hopes of receiving money for college. He was entering a hostile world. Loyalty to buddies did not overpower loyalty to humanity, in Manning's case, because the Army wasn't his buddies. So, Manning looked at the horrors of war and said to himself: I can shine a light, and that light can fix this. We can, Bradley Manning believed, have a peaceful government of, by, and for the people.
The next and last witness was Bradley's aunt, who told a very sympathetic tale paralleling Bradley's sister's. She concluded by asking the judge to consider Manning's difficult start in life, and the fact that Bradley thought he was doing the right thing when he was not thinking clearly at all.
I never screamed.
I took off my "TRUTH" shirt.
August 13, 2013
Talk Nation Radio: The EPA Lies for Frackers and Tar Sands Producers
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-the-epa-lies
Steve Horn discusses lies, fracking lies, tar-sands lies, and the EPA. Horn is a Madison, WI-based Research Fellow for DeSmogBlog. Steve previously was a reporter and researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy. His writing has appeared on The Guardian, The Nation, AlterNet, PR Watch, Truth-Out, FireDogLake, Common Dreams, CounterPunch, Wisconsin Watch, EcoWatch, PolicyMic, WhoWhatWhy.com, Z Magazine, Climate Connections, Business Insider, The Real News Network, Uganda's Daily Monitor, Modern Ghana, the London Evening Post, and elsewhere.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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Obama's Campaign to Glorify the War on Vietnam
Wars exist because lies are told about past wars.
When President Obama escalated the war on Afghanistan, he revived virtually every known lie about the war on Iraq, from the initial WMD BS to the "surge." While Americans remain unfathomably ignorant about the destruction of Iraq, a majority says the war shouldn't have been fought. A majority says the same about the war on Afghanistan. This is, pretty wonderfully, impeding efforts toward a U.S. war on Syria or Iran.
August 11, 2013
Her Name Is Jody Williams
Jody Williams' new book is called My Name Is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl's Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize, and it's a remarkable story by a remarkable person. It's also a very well-told autobiography, including in the early childhood chapters in which there are few hints of the activism to come.
One could read this book and come away thinking "Anyone really could win the Nobel Peace Prize," if people in fact told their children they could do that instead of telling them they could be president, and if one was thinking of Nobel peace laureates as saintly beings. In a certain sense, of course, anyone can win the Nobel Peace Prize, as it's often given to good people who have nothing to do with peace, and at other times it's given to warmongers. To win the Nobel Peace Prize and deserve it, as Williams did -- that's another story. That requires, not saintliness, but activism.
Activism is usually 99% perspiration and the dedication that drives it, just like genius. But in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize, and of the sort of rapid success it honors when applied in accordance with Alfred Nobel's will, the perspiration is 49%. The other 50% is timing. The activists who recruited Williams to lead the campaign to ban landmines had the timing perfect. Williams tapped into something powerful. She orchestrated some initial successes, communicated the viability and importance of the project, worked night and day, and watched many other people, in many countries, throw themselves into the campaign in a manner that people only do when they believe something will dramatically and rapidly improve the world.
How does one pick the right issue at the right time? Following the example of the land mine campaign, one must pick a topic on which the rest of the world can do some good without the participation of the U.S. government, and in fact succeed despite fierce opposition from the U.S. government, and then drag the U.S. government along, kicking and screaming, once the rest of the world has moved forward.
What strikes me most about the first half or so of Williams' book is how hard we always make it for anyone who wants to work for a better world to find appropriate employment. We dump billions into recruiting young people into the military or into business careers. Imagine if young people had to find those paths on their own. Imagine if television ads and video games and movies and spectacles at big sporting events were all used to recruit young people into nonviolent activism for peace or justice. Williams and many others could have found their way more quickly.
Williams argued with her father over the U.S. war on Vietnam. He began to come around with the exposure of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as fictional, and with the looming threat of a son being drafted -- and no doubt also as a result of Williams' persuasiveness.
What got Williams into full-time paid activism, years later, was a flyer handed to her at a Washington, D.C., metro stop. The headline read: "El Salvador: Another Vietnam?" Eventually, Williams found herself engaged in activist work that "didn't feel like work." I take this to mean that for something to "feel like work" it needed to be a waste of time. Activism, of course, is not. Think about what sort of society we have constructed in which the norm is uselessness.
Finding activism does not, of course, mean finding an easy life. It means sacrifice and risk, but fulfilling sacrifice and risk. Williams risked death and injury in Central America and suffered, among other things, rape. Years later she publicly told that story before an audience of 2,000 as part of The Vagina Monologues. "I felt it was time to use the example to tell women they didn't have to let horrible experiences ruin their lives. I didn't let it ruin mine." She didn't let all sorts of other horrible experiences stop her either.
Once Williams had begun organizing the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), success began coming much more rapidly than she expected. Resistance grew right along with it. Landmines don't kill people, governments said, people kill people. The United States was the worst, proposing to use "smart landmines" that would switch off when wars ended, thus killing the right people but not the wrong ones, killing soldiers but not farmers and children. Williams recounts the way she cursed at and denounced a U.S. diplomat who was trying to persuade her of the merits of "smart landmines." Williams didn't find peace "in her heart" or in her personal interactions in order to advance peace in the world. She advanced peace in the world through passion, and through smart strategy. The people of the world were not prepared to get passionate about working for a ban on dumb landmines. A campaign to ban dumb landmines would have resulted in nothing at all.
Williams gave not an inch in response to then-President Bill Clinton's speeches against landmines, which accompanied his policy in fierce defense of landmines. "Soaring rhetoric does nothing to save lives," she remarked -- a piece of advice of potentially endless value to supporters of President Obama's speeches against his own policies.
Campaigns against landmines developed, with Williams' help, in many countries. In Italy, activists forced the issue into the media and moved the minister of defense to support a ban. They also convinced the trade unions whose members produced landmines for a living to support a ban. Williams participated in a long march to a factory town, where four women workers held up a banner that said "We will not feed our children by making landmines that kill other people's children." Imagine creating a culture in the United States in which people took that step in significant numbers! Maybe it's starting.
The ICBL combined diplomacy with activist pressure. At a meeting with government officials in Geneva, campaigners arranged to have the sound of a landmine explosion projected every 20 minutes, and a counter display the rising count of victims around the world (one every 20 minutes). Photos of victims were displayed. Ads and stickers were everywhere. In France and Austria, campaigners delivered piles of empty shoes to prominent locations. In some African nations, the ICBL helped develop an activist civil society where there hadn't been one.
Williams had to deal with all the usual divisions that arise in a movement. Some objected to the cost of meetings when money was needed for the "real work" of removing landmines. "They somehow managed to avoid understanding that, without the pressure generated by meetings, there would have been little interest in putting up money for mine clearance at all."
In 1996, Canada took the lead in proposing to sign a treaty banning landmines in 1997. Nation after nation committed. But the United States went to incredible lengths to try to sabotage the process. At a meeting in Oslo, activists arranged for diplomats to enter the building through a simulated mine field, and to confront landmine victims when they'd made it in. Pressure was building in the right direction, but "the degree and crudeness of U.S. bullying was hard to fathom."
Williams built momentum for a very clear demand: "no loopholes, no exceptions, and no reservations." But the United States strong-armed nations and just about turned Canada against its own initiative. The ICBL began calling Canada the 51st state. Props mocked Canada even as pro-ban Canadian diplomats passed by. "What the fuck is your government doing?" Williams demanded of a Canadian official. "You started all this! If Canada caves, we will publicly fry your foreign minister."
Then came the Nobel Peace Prize, and Williams famously calling President Clinton a weenie for refusing to support the ban. It was a peace prize that actually helped a movement, and a peace prize whose recipient responded appropriately, rededicating herself to peace.
Then came the treaty to ban landmines. Then came virtually complete compliance with it, including by the United States which has still not signed on.
In her Nobel speech, Williams said this was the first time the leaders of governments had heeded a public demand. That is, of course, not true. Exceptions include August 27, 1928, when the nations of the world banned war. But such an occurrence is very rare, and the question is how to make it happen again. Blinding laser weapons were banned in 1996, and cluster bombs in 2008.
There is a movement now forming to try to ban autonomous drones. There's a parallel there to landmines, if one thinks of both as killing without human discretion. Yet, the family visited by hellfire missiles simply will not care whether a human pressed the button. And the revulsion those living under the drones feel in particular toward unmanned airplanes hardly has room to expand should those drones become autonomous. Drone murders already look like murders, even to many Americans, in a way in which much killing in war does not. Why, I wonder, shouldn't the movement be to ban weaponized drones?
Or should the movement perhaps be to enforce the ban on war? Perhaps somehow partial movements against elements of war should begin advancing an understanding of total abolition along the way. A movement to ban military bases in foreign nations, for example, could be pursued with a fundamentally anti-war philosophy. In any case, we can certainly learn about the best way forward by picking up Williams' book and engaging in a little of that practice that President Obama so despises: looking backwards.
August 8, 2013
Past Wars on Indians Aren't Even Past
Hammer in hand, one sees nails everywhere. Successful unpunished genocide at home in hand, the Pentagon sees Indian Country on six continents. But don't imagine the U.S. military is finished with the original Indian Country yet, including Native American reservations and territories, and including the places where the rest of us now live.
Compare and contrast:
Exhibit 1 from the New York Times:
"Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
Exhibit 2 from a U.S. Army dispatch in 1864:
"All Apache . . . large enough to bear arms who may be encountered in Arizona will be slain whenever met unless they give themselves up as prisoners."
Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech at Fort Carson with cavalry troops on horseback dressed in Indian-killing outfits behind him, as he praised troops in Iraq for living up to the legend of Kit Carson -- a man who marched hundreds of human beings to a camp later used as a model for the Nazis'.
Osama bin Laden was renamed by the U.S. military, Geronimo.
Winona LaDuke's The Militarization of Indian Country tells a history that isn't over, and describes a scene that cannot escape from its past. Like Coleman Smith's and Clare Hanrahan's survey of the militarization of the Southeast, LaDuke's survey of militarized Indian Country piles up numerous outrages to convey a picture of purposeful devastation on a stunning scale.
Many Native Americans live in places called Fort This or Fort That, keeping ever present the concentration camps these places were. They remain among the poorest and most environmentally devastated sacrifice zones in the United States.
"The modern U.S. military," LaDuke writes, "has taken our lands for bombing exercises and military bases, and for the experimentation and storage of the deadliest chemical agents and toxins known to mankind. Today the military continues to bomb Native Hawaiian lands, from Makua to the Big Island, destroying life."
Later, LaDuke summarizes: "From the more than a thousand nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific and the Nevada desert that started in the 1940s, obliterating atolls and spreading radioactive contamination throughout the ocean and across large areas in the American West, to the Vietnam War-era use of napalm and Agent Orange to defoliate and poison vast swaths of Vietnam, to the widespread use of depleted uranium and chemical weaponry since that time, the role of the U.S. military in contaminating the planet cannot be overstated."
In Alaska, 700 active and abandoned military sites include 1,900 toxic hot spots. People forget the seriousness of a failed plan to create a harbor in Alaska by dropping a series of nuclear bombs. Some of the actions that have in fact been taken have been only moderately less destructive than that proposal.
Uranium mines, depleted uranium testing, and nuclear waste storage have done as much or more damage to Indian Country as nuclear bomb testing. U.S. nuclear weapons are largely located in Native American territories, as well. If the Great Sioux Nation were in control of its 1851 treaty areas, LaDuke writes, "it would be the third greatest nuclear weapons power on the face of the earth."
Many Native Americans recognize in current U.S. foreign wars echoes of wars against the Indian nations. And yet, American Indians have the highest military enlistment rate of any ethnic group and the largest number of living veterans (about 22 percent of Native Americans aged 18 or over). "How," LaDuke asks, "did we move from being the target of the U.S. military to being the U.S. military itself?" Native Americans also suffer from PTSD at higher rates than other groups -- supposedly due to higher rates of combat, but just conceivably also because of greater cognitive dissonance.
I admit to finding a little of the latter even in LaDuke's wonderful book. She claims that sometimes there are "righteous reasons to fight." She opposes militarism but wants veterans to be honored. I'm writing this from a national convention of Veterans For Peace where I know numerous veterans would reject the idea that veterans should be honored. What veterans should do is organize more Native Americans and other Americans together into a movement for the abolition of militarism as well as the righting of past wrongs so that they will not any longer be repeated.
The Missiles That Brought Down TWA Flight 800
If the U.S. public began to raise a fuss about U.S. missile strikes that blow up large numbers of civilians at wedding parties abroad, it's not beyond the realm of the imaginable that the U.S. government would begin blaming the explosions on faulty candles in the wedding cakes. A similarly implausible excuse was used to explain the 1996 explosion of TWA flight 800 off Long Island, New York, and the U.S. public has thus far either swallowed the story whole or ignored the matter.
If you watch Kristina Borjesson's new film, TWA Flight 800, you'll see a highly persuasive case that this passenger jet full of passengers was brought down by missiles, killing all on board.
A CIA propaganda video aired by U.S. television networks fits with none of the known facts, makes the claim that there were no missiles, and offers no theory as to what then did cause the explosion(s) and crash into the sea.
A coverup by the FBI and the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) was blatant and extensive, involving intimidation of witnesses and investigators, tampering with evidence, false testimony before Congress, censoring reports, and numerous violations of normal protocols. Some of the government's own official investigators concluded that the explosion(s) occurred outside the airplane. They were not permitted to write analyses in their reports, as in every other investigation. Their reports were censored. They were forbidden to testify. Some 200 eyewitnesses -- people on the ground and in other planes, at least many of whom described seeing one or more missiles rising from the ground to the airplane -- were censored as well. Not a single witness was permitted to testify at the public hearing.
The military staged a test firing of missiles with witnesses, in an attempt to prove that the witnesses would either not see the missiles or testify inaccurately about what they saw. However, the witnesses all reported seeing the missiles well. The report on this test came to the opposite conclusion of what had been hoped for, but the government fed the original, hoped-for line to the media, which dutifully reported it.
Investigators thought and still think a missile or missiles brought down the plane. Eye-witnesses thought and still think the same. Explosives residue in the plane wreckage and other physical evidence in the wreckage suggests missile(s). Data from several different radars at the time of the disaster show pieces of the plane being blown off at speeds that could only have been generated by high explosives, not by a fuel tank exploding. Radar data also show the plane falling, not rising. (The CIA claimed, without offering any evidence, that the plane rose into the sky as it was exploding, thus accounting for witnesses' reports of seeing objects rising.) The damage to the seats and passengers in the plane was random, not greater closer to a fuel tank.
No more evidence was ever offered for a fuel tank exploding than could be offered in the theoretical fiction of a wedding cake exploding, or -- for that matter -- was ever offered for the Maine having been attacked by the Spanish in Havana harbor or for the Gulf of Tonkin incident having occurred or for the WMDs piling up in Iraq, or than has been offered thus far for the dreaded Iranian nuclear bomb program. There was no wiring near the fuel tank that could have caused it to explode and no other explanation than faulty wiring even hypothesized.
The film concludes that likely three missiles were shot from near the Long Island coast, including at least one from a ship at sea. The film does not address the question of who did this or why. But it presents the evidence that it happened, and that the coverup began immediately, with the disaster site being quickly closed off and guarded by roughly 1,000 police officers, roughly half of them FBI -- not the normal procedure for a plane crash. The likely speculation is, of course, that the U.S. military committed this crime. Was someone on the plane targeted for murder, and everyone else killed in the process? Was this a test of technology? Was it a mistake? Was it part of some larger plot that failed to develop? I don't know.
But I do know that the nation didn't go into a collective state of vicious rabid insanity, demanding vengeance against evildoers who hate us for our freedoms. No nations were destroyed in a sick parody of justice following the destruction of TWA flight 800. But neither were those responsible held publicly accountable in any way.
The New York Times seems impressed by the film and favors a new investigation but laments the supposed lack of any entity that could credibly perform an investigation. Think about that. The U.S. government comes off as so untrustworthy in the film that it can't be trusted to re-investigate itself. And a leading newspaper, whose job it ought to be to investigate the government, feels at a loss for what to do without a government that can credibly and voluntarily perform the media's own job for it and hold itself accountable.
The New York Post, too, takes the film quite seriously, and simply recounts its arguments without adding any commentary other than agreement. But the Daily News offers instead a textbook example of how self-censorship and obedience to authoritarianism work. Here's the complete Daily News review with my comments inserted:
"If you need to get a person's attention fast, just whisper, 'There's something the government isn't telling you.'
"Works every time."
Like the time the NSA claimed to be complying with the Fourth Amendment? Like the time nobody was being tortured in Iraq? Like the time the fracking studies showed no damage to ground water? Like the time drones weren't killing any civilians with their missile strikes?
Sure, there are bound to be times when the government is honest with us. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but it stands to reason that there are. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And it's certainly possible to invent all sorts of fantasies to allege the government to be lying about. I'm not convinced Obama was born in Africa, aliens visited New Mexico, the World Trade Center was blown up from within, or every person who emails me to complain about it is really being zapped with invisible mind-control weapons (for all I know they just watch television and come away feeling like that). But shouldn't we take claims of government deception as possibly right and possibly wrong and follow the evidence where it leads? I'm not willing to swear any of the things I list here isn't true unless evidence establishes that.
"In this case, filmmakers Kristina Borjesson and Tom Stalcup are convinced that ill-fated TWA Flight 800, which exploded over Great South Bay on July 17, 1996, was shot down by a missile."
And does the evidence suggest that they are right or wrong? Should we just pretend to know that they're wrong because the government says so? Yep:
"The original government investigation and later a second probe by the National Transportation Safety Board disagreed. Both concluded the explosion was caused by a spark in the center fuel tank."
Yet they offered no explanation for where such a spark might have come from, or why so many airplanes have been permitted to fly since, in danger of falling victim to such a spark.
"So someone is wrong. But 'TWA Flight 800' says it's more insidious than that. The government also knows it was a missile, the film strongly suggests, and simply chooses to lie. Charges of conspiratorial coverups are as common as jaywalking, of course, but 'TWA Flight 800' has more evidence than most. The advocates here include several original investigators as well as aircraft engineers, transportation and safety experts. There also are a half dozen people, civilians with no agendas, who all say they saw something streaking across the sky toward the plane before it exploded."
Why is that insidious? You don't know whether all these people are right, but the suggestion that they might be is insidious? The film in fact doesn't say the government "simply" chooses to lie. In fact, many in the government choose to speak out, forming much of the basis for the film. Others choose to cover up what happened. Most of them are clearly just following orders. Others must have motivations, but whether those motivations are simple or complex is not touched on in the film -- as this review goes on to acknowledge:
"The film doesn't really address two of the biggest questions raised by most conspiracy charges. First, why would someone cover up the truth, and second, given the number of people involved in this investigation, could they all keep a secret this big for 17 years?"
In fact, they aren't all keeping it secret. Many have been shouting the truth, as they see it, from the rooftops. Others recount why they've kept quiet. One woman explains that she was applying for U.S. citizenship and was threatened that her application would be rejected if she spoke out. The film does not address motivations for the coverup, but let me take a wild stab at doing so: If the U.S. military blew up a passenger jet full of passengers, including U.S. citizens, for no damn good reason, wouldn't we need an explanation for its wanting to go public with that? Doesn't the military's wanting to keep that quiet require no explanation at all? When the Joint Special Operations Command murders Afghan women in a night raid and then digs bullets out of their bodies with knives and claims that they were killed by their families, and then later admits the truth, are we shocked by the routine lies or by the vicious crime? Wouldn't we be more seriously shocked if the U.S. military gratuitously blurted out something true? Wouldn't taking responsibility for TWA 800 be a remarkable act of civic virtue worthy of the record books?
"But the film isn't after 'why.' It just wants to say that a lot of physical and circumstantial evidence points to a missile.
"Toward that goal, it's on target."
It is indeed, though one wouldn't have guessed that from the beginning of this newspaper's review, from media coverage in general, from history books, or from how most people have been conditioned to react to the next suspicious disaster yet to come.