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Watch Defense Secretary Leon Panetta as he trots out over and over again this week to explain before well-placed cameras that, despite “cuts” to the Pentagon budget, somehow the U.S. military will manage to muddle through, sigh, it’s OK, sigh again, cue rumbly jowls of sadness, cue raised eyebrows of dejected resignation.
Watch it, but don’t believe it.
Under the “cuts”, the Defense budget will be $36 billion bigger in 2017 than it is today.
The plan is for a bigger military budget, not a smaller one. Even Panetta’s jowls can’t hide that fact.
1/27/2012 7:05am
When they called the U.S. Marines “the few, the proud” in that television commercial, they didn’t explain the part where these proud military elites would smile for the camera while urinating on human corpses. Is that part of the U.S. Marine Corps experience why there are so few Marines?
I feel that it’s necessary for me to state explicitly that it’s a very rude thing for anyone to piss on any other person’s dead body. Most people would be shocked to see that being done to the dead body of a dog, or a horse. For this reason, it’s good that people are condemning the creation by U.S. Marines of a video showing four soldiers from the Marine Corps emptying their bladders on the dead bodies of three dead Afghan men.
Now that I’ve joined in that condemnation, though, I have to wonder at the bizarre perspective that regards it as perfectly acceptable to kill another human being, but is nonetheless outraged upon finding out that a person was urinated on after having been killed. Guns kill. Pee doesn’t.
If someone offered me the choice between being shot to death with gunfire or being pissed on, I might grimace at the thought of it, but I would not hesitate in making my choice. I would choose to let other people pee on me, even if they recorded the humiliation on a video camera.
Many Americans are now resorting to a knee jerk response that’s developed to all news of outrages committed by American soldiers. They utter their pro-war mantra, “Support Our Troops!”, and then say that the corpses that were urinated on were Taliban, and so they deserved it.
The truth is, it isn’t known whether the dead people shown in the video were affiliated with the Taliban in any way. A caption added to the video says that they were Taliban, but then, consider the source of that claim. Can people who smile while pissing on dead human corpses, and then show videos of that activity to their friends, be considered credible?
What if the corpses did belong to members of the Taliban? We still wouldn’t know what these Taliban members did, if they were violent, and whether they joined the Taliban in order to help Osama Bin Laden or were merely more recent recruits trying to fight against a foreign invasion and corrupt central government. Those who apologize for the post mortem pissing ritual are making very quick judgments against people they don’t know at all.
The most laughable statement in reaction to the video came from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which said, “This disrespectful act is inexplicable and not in keeping with the high moral standards we expect of coalition forces.”
It’s sad, but the urination by U.S. Marines on dead human corpses is entirely in keeping with the moral standards of the U.S. military and other military organizations. It isn’t inexplicable. On the contrary, it’s easy to explain. When you take impressionable teenagers who have no experience of the world outside of the care of their parents, and teach them that it’s an honorable thing to punch, kick, stab, shoot, bomb, and in other ways brutalize other people merely because they’ve been ordered to do so, it is quite predictable that those young people will lose their moral foundations and perform all manner of disrespectful acts.
War is not moral. War is not respectful. That’s the simple message that’s been lost in the coverage of the U.S. Marine golden shower video.
YouTube requires people seeking to view the videos of the U.S. Marines pissing on dead human bodies to confirm that they are 18 years or older. What a shame YouTube does not place a similar requirement on U.S. military recruitment videos.
1/12/2012 12:18pm
“I would send troops back into Iraq.”
That’s what Rick Perry said in the New Hampshire Republican presidential debate last night.
Perry’s rationale for starting a new Iraq war, and sacrificing even more American lives and money: If we don’t send American soldiers back into Iraq to restart our war there, Iran will invade Iraq, and then, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq will have been for nothing.
Will someone please send a memo over to Rick Perry explaining that George W. Bush’s purpose in invading Iraq was not to prevent an Iranian invasion? The reason the United States invaded Iraq was to capture weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.
1/8/2012 5:52am
Imagine this scenario: An Iranian spy plane is caught flying over the United States, and is shot down. A few weeks later, an Iranian aircraft carrier is spotted off the coast of the United States. All the while, the Iranians are organizing other nations in an effort to block imports and exports from crossing American borders.
How would the American government react to such a scenario? They’d consider Iran as attempting to incite a war.
The scenario I described is fictional. The reverse of this scenario, however, is taking place right now.
American politicians are agitating for war against Iran. We can’t afford the war, but then, we couldn’t afford the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan either.
As usual, the proposed war is centered around oil. The latest threats of violence by the United States and Iran are focused on control over petroleum shipments.
Who is going to take a stand against this continual push for war? Not Barack Obama. President has been weak on peace, arguing that he has the right to send the American military into battle anywhere in the world without the approval of Congress. That’s directly unconstitutional, but Obama doesn’t seem to care.
For a presidential candidate who is willing to end the saber rattling, and to do the word to establish peace, look to Jill Stein. The Stein for President campaign has pledged an end to the policy of “perpetual war” that’s been embraced by the Republican and Democratic parties.
Anti-war Americans are looking for a real change in 2012 – something neither the Republicans nor Barack Obama can deliver. Dr. Jill Stein is the most plausible peace candidate we’ve got. If you believe that America needs to escape the cycle of endless war, consider giving Stein 2012 your support.
12/29/2011 10:58pm
Republicans like to talk in general terms about cutting government waste, but it’s a congressional Democrat, Pete DeFazio, who has the guts to get specific. DeFazio is going after the single biggest source of wasteful spending in the federal government: The U.S. military. “This year,” DeFazio explained on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday, “the Pentagon will spend $670 billion, about $2 million a day, and it doesn’t know where its money is. In fact, it often doesn’t even know if it has spent money.”
Examples of the waste and ineptitude in military spending that Congressman DeFazio identified:
- An inspector general in 2000 found 2.6 trillion dollars of untraceable, unaudited military spending
- In 2003, the U.S. Army completely lost 32 tanks, 36 missile launchers, and 56 airplanes
- While soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq were short of suits to protect them from chemical and biological weapons, the Pentagon was selling those suits on the Internet at a 98 percent markdown.
- In just one year, the military bought 100 million dollars of airline tickets that it never used
- Last year, half of all military contracts were left uncompleted
Back in 1994, Congress passed legislation requiring the U.S. military to undergo a financial audit. Nonetheless, that audit has never taken place.
In this year’s defense authorization bill, the requirement of a Pentagon audit was added back in… but the congressional conference negotiating the House and Senate versions of the bill removed the audit again.
Representative DeFazio didn’t let this special maneuver back into fiscal unaccountability for the military go unnoticed. “It does not serve the national defense needs of the United States of America,” he said to his colleagues yesterday, “and it sure as heck doesn’t serve the interests of the American taxpayers. The Pentagon must be audited like every other agency of Federal Government”.
12/15/2011 1:58pm
When, in 2002, the U.S. Senate voted to approve of the resolution providing authorization for the President of the United States to go to war against Iraq, it was a terrible mistake. There was no threat from Iraq, it turned out. There was no plan for victory, it turned out. The United States of America lost huge amounts of money in Iraq. It lost thousands of Americans there. It lost its international reputation there.
Finally, nine years after that resolution was approved by the Senate, the mistake could have been corrected. The American military is finally being withdrawn from Iraq. To seal this withdrawal, Senator Rand Paul offered an amendment to the 2012 Defense authorization bill. The Paul amendment would have revoked the authority to go to war in Iraq.
Without such a revocation, the President of the United States could repeat the blunder of George W. Bush, and invade Iraq once again. This mistake could be made not just by Barack Obama, but by any future President.
Rand Paul, explaining the need for his resolution, warned his colleagues, “We’ve been at war for nearly 10 years in Iraq. we’re coming home, and we should rejoice at the war’s end. But we need to reclaim that authority. If we leave an open-ended authority out there, that says to the President or any President – if not this particular President, it could be any President – if we leave that authority out there, we basically abdicate our duty. We abdicate the role of Congress.”
The war in Iraq should never have taken place, but yesterday, the Senate could not muster the courage to admit that was the case. The Paul amendment was defeated, by a vote of 30 in favor, 67 against, and 3 refusing to vote. The vote did not take place along party lines.
24 Senate Democrats refused to vote for an end to the power to go to war in Iraq. The names of these senators are:
Daniel Akaka
Michael Bennett
Richard Blumenthal
Thomas Carper
Robert Casey
Chris Coons
Kent Conrad
Kay Hagan
Daniel Inouye
Tim Johnson
John Kerry
Herb Kohl
Mary Landrieu
Carl Levin
Barbara Mikulski
Bill Nelson
Mark Pryor
Jack Reed
Harry Reid
Charles Schumer
Debbie Stabenow
Mark Warner
Jim Webb
Sheldon Whitehouse
11/30/2011 8:09am
Student loans, pensions, health care programs, school budgets are being cut across America. There hasn’t been the big investment in clean energy solutions that we were promised. We’ve had over a decade of war, and it’s planned to go on for several years more, at least. Foreclosures are on the rise again, and tens of millions of Americans remain out of work. A congressional supercommittee is working on a package of massive budget cuts that will lead to, if they are not approved of, a round of massive budget cuts.
It’s in this context that Barack Obama is announcing an expansion of the U.S. military in the Pacific region. As we’re struggling to make ends meet here at home, Obama wants to spend more on military strategy in an arena where the United States hasn’t suffered aggression since Pearl Harbor.
Must we? Is Australia in crisis? Is South Korea on the verge? Couldn’t we have a little expansion of domestic power within the American region?
In 2008, Barack Obama was promoted as an anti-war candidate. In 2012, he’ll be running as a chum of the military-industrial complex.
11/17/2011 7:36am
Former corporate CEO Herman Cain is campaigning to represent the wealthy 1 Percent in the White House as President of the United States. However, if Cain should fail to grab the presidency in the 2012 presidential election, he has a back-up plan.
Cain announced during this weekend’s presidential debate that he would be willing to become Secretary of Defense under Mitt Romney, “to help the generals and commanders on the ground to get what they need, to do what they do best, and that is kick the you-know-what out of everyone in the world.”
Cain was surely trying to sound tough, to establish his credentials as Commander In Chief or as Secretary of Defense. What we’ve learned over the last decade of war, however, is that the ability to spit out tough-sounding lines, like a Hollywood action hero, isn’t a sufficient qualification, either for the job of Secretary of Defense or for the job of President.
We heard lots of tough talk in the days before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but all that tough talk didn’t enable the American military to prevail in either country. The wars in those countries were not intelligently planned, and they weren’t wisely deliberated. As a consequence, our nation has lost prestige, thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars.
Herman Cain doesn’t understand the difference between defense and offense. The mission of the American military is not to go out and fight against all the other nations on Earth, “to kick the you-know-what out of everyone in the world.”
Our nation cannot survive another trigger-happy President. We need national leaders who understand that true strength is demonstrated through restraint rather than through threats of random acts of violence. If Herman Cain wants to play shoot-em-up, there are video games that will allow him to do so. He should not be allowed to dispense with American soldiers, however, as if they were nothing more than pixelated extensions of his bloody fantasies.
11/14/2011 12:49pm
Why is the United States still at war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, more than 10 years after the fighting started? The standard explanation is that American soldiers are fighting to protect Afghanistan against the cruel and violent Taliban, supporting a just and democratic Afghan government that will respect the rights of the people.
What if the government that the United States has installed in Afghanistan turns out to be unjust and cruel, just like the Taliban? What if, in its conduct of the war in Afghanistan, the United States begins to adopt some of the brutal tactics of the Taliban? When that happens, the rationale for the long Afghanistan war crumbles to dust.
Today, NPR is reporting a story that provides one more blow to the credibility of the war in Afghanistan. Many Afghan villagers have independently given the same story: Soldiers from the American-installed Afghan government, accompanied by American soldiers, pulled civilians out of their houses at night and forced them to march in front of the soldiers, along a road that was known to conceal unexploded land mines.
The U.S. military says that there’s no physical evidence to corroborate the story, but what were the villagers supposed to do? Grab digital cameras from their remote, rural homes as they were being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night? The U.S. military, for its part, has failed to explain how so many independent sources could be telling similar stories about an incident that never took place.
If this incident did indeed take place, it’s a war crime. It wouldn’t be the only of its kind on the part of the Americans in Afghanistan, however. The more we see of what actually happens in war, the more clear it becomes that “war crime” is a redundant term.
10/20/2011 10:34am
Mitt Romney: Golly, big spending is great so long as it’s to blow shit up.
Norton and Ariely’s tidy tale of wealthy inequality was unfortunately massaged to hide the result that people actually want a society even more equitable than Sweden’s.
One and only one member of the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy Advisory Board on fracking does not have a financial tie to the fracking industry.
Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall write to Attorney General Eric Holder: would you please make the Obama Administration’s secret warrantless surveillance practices public, pretty please, with sugar on top?
The Department of Defense let military and covert intelligence megacontractor SAIC write the government’s terms for a contract. Guess who won the contract?
10/13/2011 6:56pm
First we were told that America had turned a corner in Iraq with "the end of major combat operations". Then, a couple months later, we were told that the insurgent attacks were a sign of desperation, and that America had turned a corner in Iraq by staying put and showing resolve. Then, months later, Saddam Hussein was captured, and we were told that America had turned a corner in Iraq because surely the insurgency would dissolve without the ultra evil Saddam to inspire it. Six months after that, the Bush Administration told us that America had turned a corner in Iraq because a new puppet government with pseudosovereignty had been created. A month ago, we were told that that America had turned a corner in Iraq because of relatively peaceful elections.
Since that time, rebel attacks have increased, not decreased. American soldiers are still fighting, killing and dying. Big suicide bombings are taking place almost every day. Yesterday, rebels destroyed a major oil pipeline in Iraq. This morning in Iraq, a suicide bomber killed 106 people, mostly members of the Iraqi National Guard, and gravely wounded many more. The death toll is sure to rise sharply throughout the day. The Bush Administration has reacted to the news by saying that it will work to reconfigure the Iraqi National Guard, bone by bone...
Life in Iraq continues to become more dangerous, and more impoverished, the longer the American occupation continues. And now that the elections have failed to produce peace, the Bush Administration doesn't have any more ideas about new corners that America might be able to turn in Iraq to make it all better.
And still, the Republicans say that it was worth all this growing suffering to start the war.
Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 8:40 AM.
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Today, some British soldiers were convicted of torturing Iraqi prisoners. One of the convicted soldiers is the fellow wearing camouflage in this photograph. In a white prison hall where the floors are designed so that bodily fluids can be easily cleaned up after an "interrogation", does camouflage keep you well hidden from enemy eyes, or does it just give you permission to treat another human being with extreme cruelty?
It's been a remarkable thing, how both American soldiers and British soldiers have been tormenting prisoners in very similar ways, in places as far away from each other as Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I suppose that George W. Bush really meant it when he promised to increase his efforts at international cooperation. It's a shame that Bush can't gain international cooperation for uplifting humanity instead of finding new ways to undermine the law and inflict pain.
By the way, if you're looking for the Iraqi freedom that has been provided by Operation Iraqi Freedom, you can see it right in the photograph above. What, you couldn't find it? Oh, the Iraqi Freedom is lying cowering in that net, helpless, waiting to get another beating. A lot of people just can't see how we've turned a corner in Iraq. Do you think the fellow on the floor will turn a corner soon too?
Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 5:48 PM.
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George W. Bush is always saying that his presidency ought to be evaluated according to how well he provides for the national defense. In almost every speech he gives, Bush goes on and on about how the primary duty of the President of the United States is to keep the American people safe.
Of course, Bush is dead wrong when he makes such claims. The Oath of Office that presidents take centers around the promise to defend the Constitution of the United States, not to enact a security state.
But, this morning, I'm feeling a little bit generous. So, for the moment, I'll assume that Bush is right, and that his primary duty as President of the United States is to defend the American people. On that level, how is Bush doing? Lousy.
This morning, we get news about one of George W. Bush's favorite defense projects: Implementing a national missile defense system, which is supposed to protect the United States against nuclear missiles. Ever since the 1980s, the Pentagon has been pushing its scientists to come up with a missile defense system that actually, you know, works. Ever since the 1980s, the Pentagon has failed to come up with any system that comes close to working.
A few years back, George W. Bush got tired of all the failed tests of missile defense prototypes. So what did he do? He ordered the system to be built now, and for the research to come up with a way to make it work to go on in the meantime.
Think about this for a second - President Bush has been spending billions of taxpayer dollars every year to build a system to defend America against nuclear missiles,
in spite of the fact that no such system has yet been invented. President Bush might as well order the federal government to spend billions of dollars to build a time machine, and then ask scientists to invent one while it is being built. Could we throw in a personal teleportation device along with it?
This morning's news is about a new test of a new attempt by the Pentagon to invent some kind of device that might have a chance of stopping an incoming nuclear missile before it destroys an entire American city. In the past, the Pentagon tried super laser ray guns, but that didn't work, so now they're trying to invent super defense missiles that can intercept incoming nuclear missiles and blow them up so that, um, a cloud of radioactive debris can descend upon the American landscape, and... um...
Anyway, this new test was supposed to prove that, 20 years after spending hundreds of billions of dollars to invent it, it is theoretically possible to build a system of interceptor missiles that can meet incoming nuclear missiles in the air and destroy them. Sadly, things didn't go quite as the Pentagon leaders had hopes. You see, they couldn't even get the interceptor missile to leave the ground.
This is the second test of an interceptor missile in which the missile didn't even succeed in lifting off the ground, much less destroying its target. So, what has the reaction of the Bush Administration been to the complete failure of these interceptor missiles been? Why, George W. Bush has bought a whole bunch of the interceptor missiles, and has already installed eight of them in missile silos in secret locations around the country. Showing some fiscal restraint, however, Bush declined to order any intergalactic hyperdrives to go along with the missile defense system.
Eight interceptor missiles that aren't even capable of leaving the ground are President Bush's idea of national defense against the threat of nuclear war involving hundreds, if not thousands, of nuclear missiles from Russia and China. George W. Bush says that we ought to judge him on how well he provides for the defense of the United States. So far, it looks like Mr. Bush has been a pathetic, wasteful failure. The only defense that these Star Wars toys provide is financial cover for the executives of big defense contracting corporations - executives who have given handsomely to George W. Bush's political campaigns.
Bush's brand of defense is the sort of thing that America is better off without. Those hundreds of billions of dollars spent on imaginary machines would have been much better spent on foreign aid, helping to repair America's tarnished reputation in the world.
The sad truth is that the only missile defense that works is for there to be no missiles. If America put half the work into global nuclear disarmarment that we put into programs to manufacture military gizmos that never work, we could soon live in a world where we didn't have to worry about nuclear weapons raining down out of the sky at any moment, with nothing to protect us but a handful of broken model rockets put together by big boys playing in the garage.
Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 10:02 AM.
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The best way to understand what the agenda of the Republican federal government for the second term of George W. Bush is to pay attention to who the Bush Administration's top supporters praise, and how they do it.
These days, an immense amount of praise is coming from Republicans, both in Congress and in the White House, for Alberto Gonzales, the White House chief counsel and the man that President Bush has picked to become the next Attorney General of the United States. It is the constitutional duty of the United States Senate to review presidential appointments for cabinet-level positions such as Attorney General, and to deny those appointments if the nominees are found to be professionally or ethically wanting. So, while a few senators have been directing their staffs to investigate the career of Alberto Gonzales, the majority of Republican senators seem to have focused their efforts on finding reasons to praise Mr. Gonzales, and defend him from any possible criticism.
As a result of their defensive efforts, senate Republicans seem to have come up with a battery of standard talking points that they are intent upon repeating, over and over, until the public accepts them as irrefutable facts. Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, for example, declared that the achievements of Alberto Gonzales are the
"manifestation of the American dream". Then on the same day, several other Republican members of Congress repeated these exact words, each declaring that the work of Alberto Gonzales for President Bush has been the
"manifestation of the American dream".Well, what exactly do we know about the work of Alberto Gonzales in the Bush White House that could make him a manifestation of the American dream? Well, the truth is that as White House counsel to George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales has earned the nickname "Mr. Torture". You see, it was Alberto Gonzales who wrote a memo advising the President of the United States that treating prisoners humanely according to the Geneva Conventions was a "quaint" and "outdated" idea. It was Alberto Gonzales who advised George W. Bush that he had the power to overrule American laws that make torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners illegal, whenever Mr. Bush made the decision that torture and cruel treatment of prisoners would be in the national interest. It was Alberto Gonzales who signed off on another memo that made up a new, alternative legal definition of torture so narrow that it would purposefully exclude many methods of torture being planned for use in American prisons by George W. Bush.
So, when Republicans like Senator Bill Frist declare that the work of Alberto Gonzales is the "manifestation of the American dream", what they're really saying is that it is the American dream to torture prisoners. The Republicans are saying that it is the American dream to give the President the power to single-handedly override American and international law. The Republicans are saying that it is the American dream to commit war crimes. This version of the American dream that Republican politicians find manifested in the work of Alberto Gonzales is a nightmare.
So, given the Republican praise for Alberto Gonzales, and their determination to push Gonzales into the position of Attorney General of the United States despite the fact that not one Democrat in the Senate Judiciary Committee saw fit to recommend him for the position, what can we expect during the next four years?
It appears that we can expect the Bush Administration to continue to place itself above the law, especially in matters of war. We can expect the Bush Administration to continue to commit war crimes in the name of the American people. We can expect more torture. We can expect more secret wars, unapproved by the U.S. Congress and unreported by the major television networks, who will be unable to get any pretty pictures of explosions from the Pentagon. We can expect the Bush Administration to conduct more illegal imprisonments, outside of the system of civilized law that dates back all the way to the Magna Carta.
We can expect the Bush Administration to drag the United States of America back into the legal abyss of the Dark Ages, when might made right and nobody dared to question the divine authority of kings.
Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 6:25 PM.
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For years now, the Bush Administration has blamed the whole mess with Israel and Palestine on one man: Yasser Arafat. Even as violence escalated between Israelis and Palestinians, George W. Bush sat by with his hands neatly folded in his lap, refusing to lift a finger to stop it. His excuse was that as long as Yasser Arafat is around, there is no hope for peace.
Well, now, Yasser Arafat is gone, and his successor has been elected, and guess what's happening? The same damn thing as before. The Israelis refuse to talk to the Palestinians because the new leadership too has been deemed too bad for negotiation. Palestinians are raining gunfire and rockets into Israeli neighborhoods. Israeli tanks are attacking Palestinian neighborhoods. There is no more peace now than there was before.
The stupidly simple analysis of George W. Bush has always been that single evil leaders are responsible for the bad things that happen in the world. Bush seems to believe that once those bad bad people are removed from power, everything will suddenly get all nice again.
In Iraq, and now in Palestine, Bush's childish theory has been soundly disproved.
It is time that American foreign policy in the Middle East be driven by a more grown-up understanding of conflict. When it comes to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Palestinians and the Israelis both are to blame.
What is most terrifying of all is that Bush seems to accept the same twisted logic that continues to propel the Israeli-Palestinian bloodbath year after year after year: The idea that the only way to get peace is to completely subdue one's opponents through military force. The Israelis and Palestinians both have been propelled forward in a cycle of death and despair by this idea for generations.
The only way that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is for courageous people on both side to demand that their leaders step back from the fighting. Unfortunately, the continued inaction of the Bush Administration, combined with Bush's encouragement of unrestrained military attacks on the part of the Israelis, makes such principled restraint all the more difficult.
Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 8:22 AM.
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In the creation of the Martin Luther King National Holiday, initial direct resistance from Republicans has been transformed into a radical reduction of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the new, politically sanitized version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, we are supposed to believe that he:
1. Was a really good public speaker
2. Wanted black and white people to get along
3. Shouldn't have been shot
Everything else about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life gets all smudged out in a weekend's repetition of the out of context phrase, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, I'm free at last!"
The life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was too complex to be reduced to such little clips, and I won't pretend to do justice to him here in one small article. However, I will mention three things that are commonly cleaned away from his life:
1. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a strong opponent of war
2. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood up for the principle of freedom and dignity of all people, not just the residents of some "homeland"
3. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. worked to make the government accountable to all the people
On all three counts, we have great cause in 2005 to regard the Martin Luther King National Holiday as a wake up call to the American people. The narrowly-won second presidency of George W. Bush is showing strong signs of continuing the anti-peace, anti-freedom, and anti-accountability agenda that marked the first four years.
A good way to celebrate this holiday, and a good way to spark a movement of nonviolent, principled resistance of the sort that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have admired, is to
read a shocking article that was published this very morning.
The article is by Seymour Hersch, the journalist who exposed the torture taking place in the Abu Ghraib prison. Now, Seymour Hersch has discovered what appears to be a plot within the Bush Administration to circumvent the power of Congress and begin a new military campaign against Iran and other nations in secret from the American people.
We'll discuss the implications of this article in greater depth in the days to come. For now, remember the broader character of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and
read.
Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 4:15 PM.
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Since the War on Terror began, we have been besieged with the pro-war slogan: Freedom isn't free!
Well, okay. Freedom is not free. Isn't it funny, though, that the Freedom Isn't Free Crowd never bothers to mention the price that they're asking us to pay?
The pro-war crowd wants us to believe that the inevitable price we all must pay for freedom is war. Well,
bull.
No, freedom is not free, but you can't buy it with buckets of blood. Bomb all you want, and it won't make you any more free than if no bombs were dropped. Bullets don't buy freedom, and neither do bayonets.
Freedom is bought with the hard work of peaceful people who struggle to establish a society that values liberty and fairness. For Americans, freedom is established by the U.S. Constitution, not on the battlefield. The Revolution came and went, and yet the Bill of Rights was not yet created. It took the peaceful political process of a new Constitutional Congress to bring true freedom to the former colonies.
Throughout history, war has threatened freedom as much as it has protected it. We will not retain our freedom if we keep on falling back to a default assumption that every war is fought in the defense of freedom.
Buyer beware. Freedom is already ours, if we will protect it from the corrupt politicians who seek to remove it from our society in the cause of fear. No, freedom is not free, but we do not have to pay the price that the pro-war zealots insist upon.
Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 1:14 PM.
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