David Swanson's Blog, page 170
August 22, 2012
Welcoming a Warmonger to Town on Wednesday
Wow, it's been a while, but protests of war makers in Charlottesville will be back big time next Wednesday. It seems like ages since we protested John Yoo, or even since our threatened protest of Dick Cheney scared him out of coming to town. But opportunity is knocking and a massive nonviolent protest is sure to answer.
August 21, 2012
Talk Nation Radio: The War on Whistleblowers With Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack
Jesselyn Radack and Thomas Drake discuss their experiences as government whistleblowers, the retribution they've endured, and the currently worsening pattern of secrecy, intimidation, and persecution of whistleblowers in Washington, D.C.
Jesselyn Radack is a former ethics adviser to the U.S. Department of Justice who came to prominence as a whistleblower after she disclosed that the FBI committed an ethics violation in its interrogation of John Walker Lindh (the "American Taliban") without an attorney present, and that the Department of Justice attempted to suppress that information. Her experience is chronicled in her memoir, TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the "American Taliban". Radack was this past year's co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award.
Jesselyn Radack is the Government Accountability Project's National Security & Human Rights Director. In her role, she works primarily with national security and intelligence community whistleblowers, including those from the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, NSA and CIA – with a special focus on torture, secret surveillance, secrecy, and political discrimination. See http://whistleblower.org
She recently represented former NSA official Thomas Drake on whistleblower matters stemming from the government's unsuccessful prosecution of him under the Espionage Act.
Thomas Drake is a former senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, computer software expert, and whistleblower. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams award. The government's retribution against Drake, for exposing waste, abuse, and incompetence, included charging him under the Espionage Act. The charges fell apart.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Engineer: Christiane Brown.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download or get embed code from Archive.org or AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Embed on your own site with this code:
<object autostart="false" data="http://davidswanson.org/sites/davidsw..." height="100px" width="400px"></object>
Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free and complete at http://davidswanson.org/talknationradio
August 20, 2012
You Say You Want a Revolution of Values?
I spoke this past weekend at the Kateri Peace Conference in upstate New York ( http://kateripeaceconference.org ) along with Kathy Kelly, John Horgan, Ellen Grady, James Ricks, Matt Southworth, Walt Chura, and many others. Watch for the video, because a terrific discussion took place around a series of questions posed by the event organizers. The following are some of the initial responses I had prepared beforehand.
Why Work Against War
War engages me because of its unique relationship to morality. Killing is a long-standing taboo. Killing is often if not always the worst thing that can be done to someone. But killing on a larger scale, organizing numerous people to kill numerous other people is often treated very differently. When a government kills its own people, that's generally considered an outrage. But when a government kills another nation's people, that's not always viewed as a moral problem. In fact a government killing its own people is often used as a justification for another nation to come in and kill more of the first nation's people. Killing in war, and lesser crimes in war, are given a moral pass or even praised. A U.S. military sniper bragged on the debut episode this week of NBC's war reality show "Stars Earn Stripes" that he had "160 kills." Not that he killed 160 people. The people are erased in his language. "I have 160 kills." And the show itself is a dramatization of U.S. news coverage of U.S. wars, in which the only participants are Americans. The 95% of victims in our one-sided slaughters are rarely mentioned in U.S. news coverage, and on this new war-o-tainment show the heroic warriors attack empty fields, blow up guard towers with no guards, kick in doors of uninhabited houses, and spend so much time talking about how "real" it all is that none of them seem to notice that there are no enemies or victims to be found.
August 15, 2012
Talk Nation Radio: How Drones Appear from the Receiving End
Rafia Zakaria, a Pakistani-American writer, reports on how drones look from thousands of miles away from the desks at which they are "piloted." Zakaria is a columnist for the English-language Pakistani newspaper Dawn, a blogger for Ms. Magazine and for Human Rights Now, and a director for Amnesty International USA. Drones will not look the same to you after listening to her.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Engineer: Christiane Brown.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download or get embed code from Archive.org or AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Embed on your own site with this code:
<object autostart="false" data="http://davidswanson.org/sites/davidsw..." height="100px" width="400px"></object>
Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free and complete at http://davidswanson.org/talknationradio
August 13, 2012
NBC's Celebrity Warriors: "They barely survived the first week!"
If you sat through the two-hour debut of NBC's "Stars Earn Stripes" on Monday, you heard the promotion for next week's show: "They barely survived the first week!" And you thought to yourself: "Uh, no, that was me."
What intolerable filth! In this "reality" show, "celebrities" we've mostly never heard of are paired off with current or former members of the U.S. military to "play" at "missions reminiscent of counterinsurgencies that have taken place all over the world." It's war for fun. This sport has all the excitement of golf, but without the same level of danger. Nobody "barely survived." Nobody killed anybody. Nobody's suffering moral anguish from what they've seen and done. Nobody's lost any limbs. And nobody's a suicide risk, with the possible exception of the producer.
Just prior to the show's debut, nine Nobel Peace Prize laureates, not including the one whose "counterinsurgencies" the show reenacts, released a statement demanding the show's removal from the air:
"Real war is down in the dirt deadly. People -- military and civilians -- die in ways that are anything but entertaining. Communities and societies are ripped apart in armed conflict and the aftermath can be as deadly as the war itself as simmering animosities are unleashed in horrific spirals of violence. War, whether relatively short-lived or going on for decades as in too many parts of the world, leaves deep scars that can take generations to overcome – if ever. Trying to somehow sanitize war by likening it to an athletic competition further calls into question the morality and ethics of linking the military anywhere with the entertainment industry in barely veiled efforts to make war and its multitudinous costs more palatable to the public."
In other words, we're dealing here with the crime of war propaganda, not for any particular war, but for the normalization of eternal war on the borders of the empire.
A crowd protested the show at NBC headquarters in New York on Monday evening, chanting "Shame, Shame, War is not a Game," and delivering a petition bearing thousands of signatures.
The show's first episode opened with co-host and retired general Wesley Clark claiming that soldiers sacrifice for the rest of us. Dean Cain, an actor who played Superman, remarks that he had never before had to "be a superhero for real." Numerous other voices go on and on about soldiers' heroism, claiming that they "do this" "for our freedom." But the "this" turns out to be a game that the contestants describe themselves as "playing."
One of the military "operatives" paired with a celebrity brags about having killed 160 people. That split-second comment is the only appearance in the two-hour marathon of the enemies or victims of war. One celebrity asks their partner if he's ever killed anyone, and he replies, "We don't talk about that." Neither does NBC. The people whom U.S. troops slaughter in our one-sided occupations or wars are never brought up.
The episode involved training for a mission and then performing the mission as a contest with four people on each team. The "mission" was to "infiltrate a hostile encampment." This meant that they had to ride in a helicopter, jump in a lake, climb in a boat, pretend to be shot at by "enemies" not actually shooting or appearing, blow up a guard tower with no guard in it, shoot human-sized paper targets, wade through mud, locate a box of ammunition and move it into a building, and blow up the building by pushing a button.
This stupidity is chock full of exclamations and commentary about real bullets and real explosives that are really real. It may be the noise of their own voices that prevents anyone involved from discovering that they aren't actually shooting at anyone and no one is actually shooting at them.
Kicking in doors is a big focus of the mission. This ought to inform thoughtful viewers about what "battlefields" look like in "counter insurgencies." Our wars are fought in people's homes. But when these celebrities and the tough guys they worship kick in doors there are no screaming children behind them. This act of terrorism is transformed into an act of athletic accomplishment. Blowing up a poor person's house is transformed into an act of special effects, creating a gigantic explosion with the push of a button while being lifted on a rope tied to a helicopter. When, at the end of the show, it is time to eliminate the worst warrior from future programs, the two worst warmakers thus far pair off in a contest that involves kicking in a door, entering a room, and shooting a bunch of humanoid targets in the head. I wonder which missions that is reminiscent of.
Muhammad Ali famously remarked, when refusing to participate in war: "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. . . . No Viet Cong ever called me nigger." His daughter Laila Ali is a Stars Earn Stripes celebrity contestant blissfully unconcerned about whether or not she has a quarrel with the people who theoretically might inhabit the buildings she's shooting up. War lovers must feel some satisfaction in having brought Ali's daughter into the fold, along with the late football star and soldier Pat Tillman, who had turned against our wars but for whose charity one of the Stars Earn Stripes celebrities is competing. When one of the celebrities lies, "I know there's a chance I could die," one imagines he must have in mind friendly fire. Like Tillman, he would die with no enemy present. To make the show seem dangerous, the producers show one celebrity, Dolvett Quince, having trouble swimming.
The losing team in each mission/sporting event loses by completing the mission with the slowest time. Yet the show itself is almost unbearably slow, repetitive (literally replaying the same little snippets of "action"), and so packed with commercial breaks that it's hard to imagine people waiting through them voluntarily. But the whole thing is a commercial for war, the business of 49% NBC owner General Electric. No matter how small the audience for this slime, it is likely to be disproportionately made up of young people contemplating enlistment. And what a massive and deadly lie this show is to them!
These celebrities are unlikely to suffer PTSD or to die in the most common way in which actual members of the military die (suicide). There's no fear, no horror, no revulsion, no moral crisis. Asked what their biggest concerns are prior to their "mission" they say things like "how high the helicopter will fly." This is beyond promoting war as a hell that is somehow necessary as a last resort. This is war as exciting sport with no moral component, no killing, no dying, no downside. Now we don't have to be sociopaths to support the military as a jobs program; we can be patrons of the arts (or the sports anyway).
At one point, one of the celebrities, Eve Torres, in tears, says that she appreciates those who do such difficult stunts "every day" as their job. "We do this for fun," she says. Yet, when her heroes practice these extreme sports they do so with real victims in real nations, generating real enemies. NBC doesn't include that complication. Nowhere in Stars Earn Stripes do we hear about the list of countries that Wesley Clark said the Pentagon wanted to attack and overthrow right after 9-11: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. And of course we are not told what he said the motivation for those attacks would be, namely trying to look strong and to dominate the globe. Clark was outraged to learn that "the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments, it's not to deter conflict; we're going to have to invade countries, and you know my mind was spinning; they wanted us to destabilize the Middle East . . . . They could hardly wait to finish Iraq so that they could move into Syria." Clark was talking then about the same sort of people who are running the U.S. military now.
Stars Earn Strips could have gone differently. Imagine if the "mission" were to put out a fire or rescue people from a storm. Or the mission could have been to save our atmosphere. Or how about a mission to see who is fastest at building the fastest and most energy efficient trains? Or . . . anything useful in any way!
The excitement (such as it is) of NBC's "reality show" lies precisely in its being "reminiscent" of war, and not of some beneficial project. And yet it is not war. And it may be doomed to low ratings. If it were war, however, its ratings wouldn't necessarily rise. Americans don't want to see families slaughtered, children mutilated, whole regions of the world ruined for human life, refugees struggling to survive, cluster bombs and depleted uranium killing for generations. What's fun about that?
If NBC would like to show the uglier side of war, we've provided resources to get them started at http://StarsEarnStripes.org
Big Peace Gathering in New York State August 17-18
The 14th Annual Kateri Tekakwitha Peace Conference will be held in upstate New York on August 17-18, 2012.
Speakers including Thomas Gumbleton, Kathy Kelly, John Horgan, Clare Grady, David Swanson, Matt Southworth, Walt Chura, and James Ricks will address the topic of revolutionary love.
Learn more: http://kateripeaceconference.org/2012Conference/2012-conference
August 11, 2012
What Paul Ryan Has and Obama Wants
According to the Huffington Post, "President Barack Obama's reelection campaign and Democratic political groups have been eager for Romney to pick Ryan, the architect of plans to slash government spending and overhaul entitlement programs that Democrats believe are political losers." ABC agrees: "The selection of Ryan as running mate makes it far more likely that Medicare, Social Security, and dramatic spending cuts will be as central to the campaign conversation this
August 10, 2012
Lies, Damn Lies, and War Lies
Prepared remarks for Veterans For Peace Convention 2012.
Prepared to follow remarks by Nicolas "Sandy" Davies
Convention theme: "Liberating the Americas: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean"
Remarks theme: "U.S. Military Expansion since the End of the Cold War"
Accompanying powerpoint: http://warisacrime.org/downloads/misleading2.pptx
