Recently in wars and militarism Category
Pakistan is a country who's top government scientist exported atomic bomb-making across the world for decades. It still hosts Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan's Taliban are still more-or-less headquartered in its Western provinces. The standoff with India has spawned war after war over the decade, now nuclear-enabled should either country get so emboldened. Billions of dollars of United States money has left Washington for Islamabad since 9/11 and a popular politician can't even campaign there without deadly assassination attempts. Pakistan is one of the world's hot spots, a nexus of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, religious extremism. It is a very sad day today indeed.
The department is taking an even harder line with other Congressional committees looking into the matter, and is refusing to provide information about any role it might have played in the destruction of the videotapes.The Times article goes on to explain that scheduled grilling of CIA officials by the House Intelligence Committee will almost definitely be postponed because of the Justice Department's obstruction.
2002: the CIA tortures prisoners and films the proceedings;
2005: the CIA destroys the evidence because it would implicate those agents who conducted torture;
2007: the Justice Department tries to shut down Congressional investigations into the tapes' destruction.
Thankfully Congressional leaders don't seem to be standing down in the wake of the Justice Department bullying, with both Democrats and Republicans vowing to press on. From the Washington Post: "Congressional leaders from both parties alleged that Justice is trying to block their investigation and vowed to press ahead with hearings." Will Congress finally start demanding accountability for how American intelligence forces have been acting since 2001? Well, don't hold your breath. Still we might all be in store for some interesting revelations over the next couple of weeks.
Just over the wires: Mistrial declared court-martial of war objector. Details:
A military judge declared a mistrial on Wednesday in the court-martial of a U.S. Army officer, who publicly refused to fight in Iraq and criticized the war.
It’s great to see that some soldiers are seriously debating the ethics of this war.
In the news: more than 1,000 service members sign petition to end Iraq War (Stars and Stripes), organized by the Appeal for Redress campaign sponsored by a handful of military antiwar groups including Nonviolence.org alums Veterans for Peace. The simple petition reads:
As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.Supporting the troops means making sure American lives aren’t being wasted in dead-end wars. Their service and their sacrifice has been too great to continue the lies that have fueled this conflict since the very beginning, starting with the mythical Saddam/Al Qaeda connection and the phantasmic weapons of mass destruction. The current escalation (euphemised as a “surge”) of troop levels is simply an escalation of a badly-run war plan. When will this all end?
Update: President Bush has admitted that the Iraq government fumbled the executions.. Meanwhile, the UN puts the 2006 Iraqi death toll at 34,000. When will Bush admit he’s fumbled this whole war?
United States air strikes in Somalia were meant to kill specific al Qaeda leaders. Whether the bombs achieved this effect is still uncertain but we know one thing: that it will be much easier for al Qaeda to recruit the next generation of Somali terrorists. From the NY Times, Airstrike Rekindles Somalis’ Anger at the U.S.. Sigh.
Voices for Creative Nonviolence is doing some organizing around the fighting in Lebanon/Israel/Gaza. Check out Beyond the Escalation of Injustice which calls for “direct engagement.”
Through them I found a link to Jihad Against Hezbollah, the new piece from Steven Zunes, a very knowledgable writer for Foreign Policy in Focus. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (this afternoon on the train) but it looks like good background material on the group.
In the New York Times, a glimpse behind the scenes of the Bush Administration’s support for war in Lebanon:
Washington’s resistance to an immediate cease-fire and its staunch support of Israel have made it more difficult for [US Secretary of State] Rice to work with other nations, including some American allies, as they search for a formula that will end the violence and produce a durable cease-fire….
Several State Department officials have privately objected to the administration’s emphasis on Israel and have said that Washington is not talking to Syria to try to resolve the crisis. Damascus has long been a supporter of Hezbollah, and previous conflicts between the group and Israel have been resolved through shuttle diplomacy with Syria.
The wars in Lebanon and Iraq are causing irreparable harm to the U.S. image in the Middle East. High-sounding words about democracy ring hollow when we forsake diplomacy.
I’m returning from a working summer sabbatical from Nonviolence.org to find the world situation both completely the same and completely different. It is the best of times and the worst of times, no? My April editorial, Making Friends, Making Enemies and Looking Toward the Future is a call to peace that’s as relevant to developments in Israel, Lebanon, Iran and iraq but just as likely to be ignored.
Sometimes it feels that war is inevitable. The terrain of southern Lebanon is once more being chewed up by tanks and rockets. Israel’s army and the Hezbollah militia keep one-upping the level of violence. Wars of evident defense can be a great recruitment tool for angry young men and neither military force is in any danger of being overwhelmed or destroyed. That thankless job goes to the civilians caught in the middle. Warfare in the age of terror consists of slaughtering innocents in the name of righteous self-defense. Hostilities never really end, they take a break after enough blood has been spilt to satisfy the powers behind the killing.
The Hezbollah rockets heading south and Israeli tanks going north are symbols of the proxy war that is being run from thousands of miles away. Hezbollah’s arms come from Iran, Israel’s from the United States. While there might be simmering resentments and isolated acts of violence, there would not be a war without these sponsors. The fighting in Lebanon could be switched off like a light bulb with the slightest nod from either Washington or Tehran.
iraq is the other front of this proxy war. Yesterday General John P. Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East, told the Senate that Iran could slide into civil war. The BBC is reporting that senior British diplomat William Patey informed Tony Blair last week that “the prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of iraq is probably more likely at this state than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.”
Baghdad has more-or-less seen fighting since American troops entered it but the decentralized insurgency is giving way to a kind of sectarian violence that is far more dangerous. If Patey’s prophecy comes to pass iraq will be our next Lebanon: a bloody, seemingly-intractable civil war lasting decades, turned on and off by diplomatic whim from abroad, a killing field where innocents die for the false rhetoric of idealism far far away.
Images from Wikipedia articles on the Israel-Lebanon conflict and iraq War
It seems that every day brings new revelations from mainstream media about governmental spying on Americans.
MS-NBC started the ball rolling on the 14th when they informed us that the Pentagon had a database of protesters including the Raging Grannies and a dozen or so Quakers in Florida. This must have prompted the New York Times to publish a story they had been sitting on for a year: the scoop that Bush had ordered the super-secret National Security Agency to start evesdropping on Americans following the 9/11 terror attacks. It’s revelation was an FBI agent’s email complaining about radical militant librarians [who] kick us around. Two days later we received the almost-humorous news that the Department of Homeland Security was hard at work monitoring the Massachusett’s inter-library loan system [UPDATE: this has been revealed to be a hoax by the student]. Trying to outdo the DHS in ridiculous, we learned on the 20th that the FBI has been infiltrating vegan potlucks. Today it turns out the New York City Police Department has been doing its own extensive investigations into protesters. They even apparently staged mock arrests in an attempt to incite violence (their contribution to the self-parody has been to send officers undercover on bicycle protests).
Are we surprised by all this? Well, not really. The fears unleashed after 9/11 ignited a firestorm of paranoia in the ranks of spydom. Nonviolence.org got a call from the U.S. Secret Service when Osama bin Laden posted to the board that he wanted to kill President Bush (well, actually we’re pretty certain it was a acne-faced fourteen year old procrastinating on his geometry homework). When I shot shot photos of a scuffle at a Biodemocracy protest a few months ago a Philadelphia police detective was in my office an hour later wanting to see it (the “melee” was harmless except for a policeman with heart conditions who took that moment to have a heart attack).
While some monitoring and prudence is indeed necessary, what ties together the string of stories this week is the randomness of the targets. It’s as if the agencies had lost all sense of judgement. Anyone critical of the war (or even mainstream culture: witness the vegans) was considered a threat. All leads were investigated, no matter how silly.
While invading American’s privacy is upsetting and unwarranted, the greatest danger is the sheer mass of irrelevant information that’s been collected. What’s an agency to do with reams of data on bicycle riders and Quakers? Who’s watching the flight schools and fertilizer depots while Agent Nincompoop is trading hummus recipes with the cute vegan with the nosering?
There’s a reasonable expectation that intelligence agencies should be possessed of a certain degree of intelligence. The graphic pictures of U.S. military personnel torturing prisoners in iraq and Guantanamo Bay outraged Americans and brought condemnation from all corners of the civilized world.
The stories that came out of Badgdad’s Al Grahib prison gave a boost to the iraqi insurgency, proof of the brutality of the American invaders that could be paraded across the screens of Al Jazeera. We’ve never heard that any reliable intelligence information ever came from the degrading interrogation practices employed at Al Grahib, which shouldn’t be a surprise: torture has never been a particularly effective intelligence-collection technique (many of the detainees at Al Grahib were taxi drivers at the wrong place at the wrong time when a military sweep came through). Torture’s real purposes are usually much baser: revenge, humiliation and base cruelty.
Lesson to the White House: Unless you want to stroke the insurgency (and get more U.S. soldiers killed), lay off the torture.
Unfortunately we have a White House that doesn’t learn lessons very well. The U.S. Senate voted 90-9 last week on a John McCain-sponsored amendment to ban the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of detainees held by the United States government. President George W. Bush is now actively lobbying the Senate to add a loophole that would allow U.S. intelligence agency to continue torture.
Yes, that’s right, the President of the United States (“Beacon of the Free World,” “The Light of Democracy,” etc.) is officially going on record as a supporter of “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners. It’s a sign of a certain kind of inhumanity, or at least insensitivity, that Bush even had the guts to approach the author of the anti-torture amendment asking for the CIA exemption, for McCain spent much of his Vietnam War service being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison.
What kind of intelligence is needed to know Bush’s lobbying is yet another gift to the propaganda arm of iraqi insurgency? It looks like we’ll be getting to that 2,000th solider soon.
By Johann Christoph Arnold
“If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine? …One option is the use of the military… I think the president ought to have all…assets on the table to be able to deal with something this significant.” - President George W. Bush, news conference, October 4, 2005
For years, health officials have warned that a virulent strain of avian influenza could rapidly spread the globe, killing millions. Headlines about such an outbreak now seem to pop up daily, and there is reason for increasing concern. But President Bush’s recent request to Congress, asking for the authority to call in the military as part of the government’s response to such a disaster, is wrong.
To start with, calling in the troops would set a worrying precedent, and not only because it would be yet one more step to a fully militarized state.
We already have public health systems at both the state and federal levels, which, though weakened by years of underfunding, could still be quickly strengthened and expanded by an infusion of congressional aid. These agencies have been operative for years, and the people who direct them are trained and experienced in dealing with infectious disease.
This is more than a medical issue. Have we learned nothing from the recent spate of natural disasters that has wracked our shores? Have we not considered that in the end, disease, pestilence, and floods might be an inescapable part of life?
I am not suggesting that we should stand idly by. I myself have children and grandchildren and friends whom I dearly love, and would be the first to call for professional medical assistance should such a disaster strike my family or community. But aren’t we a little audacious in thinking, in the aftermath of two terrible hurricanes, that we can somehow avert or prevent such a tragedy?
Quarantine and isolation may indeed be a necessary part of our response, but let us not forget that families and pastoral caregivers must also be part of the equation when many people are dying. Does our government really care for human beings, or does it worry more about the devastation such a pandemic could wreak on the global economy?
If widespread death is truly imminent (some sources suggest that 150 million people could die of avian flu) wouldn’t it be better to prepare ourselves by paying at least some attention to the fact that we all must die one day, and that dying is going to be terribly lonely, and frightening, if we are quarantined? We need to concern ourselves with this issue because one day death will claim each one of us.
If we die alone, under the control of the military, who will provide the last services of love for us, and who will comfort the loved ones we leave behind? Are we going to sit back while we are denied the chance to lay down our lives for each other, which Jesus says is the greatest act of love we can ever perform? A military response will not bring out the best in people, but only magnify the fear and anxiety we already have about death.
Why are we so terribly afraid of dying? Only when we are ready to suffer—only when we are ready to die—will we experience true peace of heart. Dying always involves a hard struggle, because we fear the uncertainty of an unknown and unknowable future. We all feel the pain of unmet obligations, and we all want to be relieved of past regrets and feelings of guilt. But it is just here that we can reach out and help one another to die peacefully.
Once we recognize this, the specter of a worldwide flu epidemic will not make us fear death, but give us pause to consider how we can use our lives to show love, while there is still time.
Again, enforced isolation is wrong: sick and dying people are often lonely as it is, even in situations where they have a family and friends. How will they feel when the government forces us to treat them like lepers? How will they find comfort, if they are not even allowed to talk about what is happening to them?
We should see it as a privilege to stand at their bedsides at the hour of death, not a danger—even if this means that we are eventually taken by the same plague. That is why I feel military intervention would be such a tragedy.
Johann Christoph Arnold (www.ChristophArnold.com) is an author and a pastor with the Bruderhof Communities (www.bruderhof.com).
The resignation of the government is Lebanon is being hailed as a “boost for democracy” Reports describe Beirut as a sea of excitement. ABC News and others are reporting that Syria is about to announce its withdrawl from Lebanon. How wonderful it would be if Beirut could emerge from its thirty years of chaos with the start of the 1975 civil war.
Even good change can cause turmoil. David Hirst, writing in the guardian, wonders whether the upheaval threatends to destabilize Syria and turn it into another iraq: “After the example of elections, however flawed, in occupied iraq and Palestine, has come this new, unscheduled outbreak of popular self-assertion in a country [Lebanon] where a sister Arab state, not an alien occupier, is in charge.”
For the latest news, you can turn to the Guardian’s special report on Syria and iraq. To jump in the fray, you can turn to the Nonviolence Board’s thread on the resignation of the Lebanese government
Apparently the U.S. is pressuring Qatar to sell the Al Jazeera TV network The best line in the New York Times article:
Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other Bush administration officials have complained heatedly to Qatari leaders that Al Jazeera’s broadcasts have been inflammatory, misleading and occasionally false, especially on iraq.
So I suppose Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell have never given out misleading or occasionally false information about iraq?
Al Jazeera is watched by 30 million to 50 million viewers. It’s coverage has been inflammatory and I’m not going to defend that, but it’s the most important media source in the Middle East and should not be shut down by American pressure. Qatar is only considering selling it, but potential buyers for the financially-strapped network are few. And the Cheney team wouldn’t be involved if they weren’t interested in making it’s content more U.S. friendly.
While the images of U.S. soliders torturing iraqi prisoners at Al Grahib Prison in Badgdad have been broadcast around the world, US officials have frequently reassured us that conditions at the U.S. detention camp in Guantamano Bay, Cuba, were acceptable and in accord with the Geneva Convention’s rules for treatment of prisoners. As proof the Pentagon and Bush Administration have frequently cited the fact that the International Red Cross regularly inspects prison conditions at Guantamano. They forgot to tell us what they’ve seen.
A confidential report prepared by the International Red Cross this summer found that conditions at Guantamano Bay were “tantamount to torture.” Strong words from a cautious international body. Because of the way the IRC works, its reports are not made available to the public but instead presented to the accused government, in the hope that they will correct their practices. In predicable fashion, the Bush Adminstration privately denied any wrongdoing and kept the IRC findings secret. In a display of incredible audacity it then defended itself from other accusations of torture by citing the IRC’s presence at Guantanamo, conveniently omitting the IRC’s strongly-worded criticisms. Amazing really.
The IRC report is still secret. We only know of it second-hand, from a memo obtained by the Times that quotes from some of its findings (“Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30gitmo.html, Nov 29). What kind of stuff is going on there? The Times recently interviewed British prisoners who had been detained in Afghanistan and iraq and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Here’s one story:
One one regular procedure was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels.
It’s not needles under fingernails or electrodes to the privates, but it is indeed “tantamount to torture.” While it was hard to believe these prisoners’ stories when they were first published a few months ago, they become much more credible in light of the IRC conclusions.
We still don’t know about what’s happening in the camp. The Bush Administration has the power, not to mention the duty, to immediately release International Red Cross reports. But the United States has chosen to suppress the report. No torturing government has ever admitted to its actions. Saddam Hussein himself denied wrongdoing when he ran the Al Grahib prison and used it for torture. We rely on bodies like the International Red Cross to keep us honest.
There are those who defend torture by appealing to our fears, many of which are indeed grounded in reality. We’re at war, the enemy insurgents are playing dirty, Osama bin Laden broke any sort of international conventions when he sent airliners into the World Trade Center. Very true. But the United States has a mission. I believe in the idealistic notion that we should be a beacon to the world. We should always strive for the moral high ground and invite the world community to join us. We haven’t been doing that lately. Yes it’s easier to follow the lead of someone like Saddam Hussein and just torture anyone we suspect of plotting against us. But do we really want him as our role model?
On Tuesday Vice President Dick Cheney told an Iowa audience that there would be more terrorism in the U.S. if he wasn’t re-elected Vice President:
“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice,” Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 people in Des Moines, “because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.”
His words underscore just how much the Bush/Cheney Administration have relied on the 9/11 terrorist attacks for their political legitimacy. Terror breeds terror and fear, anger and violence escalates in its wake. The wars in Afghanistan and iraq are shaping a new generation of America haters, as much because the post-war rebuilding has been so careless and self-serving to American economic interests. War-mongerers in one country support the war-mongerers in another by providing each another with targets and arguments. The cycle goes on.
An unintentionally hilarious interview of President George W. Bush is excerpted in today’s New York Times_. One gem concerned global warming. Just a few days ago his secretaries of energy and commerce delivered a report to Congress saying that carbon dioxide emissions (cars, coal burning plants, etc.) really are causing global warming. Well yes, most of us have figured that out already but this is an Administration that’s runned and staffed by oil industry executives and they’ve insisted for years that the evidence isn’t clear. That they’re now admitting the cause of global warming is big and it should certainly auger a overhaul of U.S. energy policies. But when asked why the administration had changed its position on what causes global warming Bush responded “Ah, we did? I don’t think so.”
He also admitted that he had made a “miscalculation of what the conditions would be” in postwar iraq but said he wasn’t going to go “on the couch” to rethink his decision or his decision-making process. Uhh.., Mister President, maybe you should think about this before offering to serve another four years?
In the LA Times, Advocates of War Now Profit From iraq’s Reconstruction
Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey is a prominent example of the phenomenon, mixing his business interests with what he contends are the country’s strategic interests. He left the CIA in 1995, but he remains a senior government advisor on intelligence and national security issues, including iraq. Meanwhile, he works for two private companies that do business in iraq and is a partner in a company that invests in firms that provide security and anti-terrorism services.
In Under the Same Sun, Is This Any Way to Run an Occupation, links and commentary about how politically-connected U.S. companies are pilfering iraqi oil money without audits, competitive bidding or oversight.
Beltway lawyers might find all this perfectly legal, but where I come from we call these kind of kickbacks good ol’ boy corruption. And the rest of the world will just see the familiar pattern of modern-day colonialism: a rich American elite getting even richer by extracting third-world resources at gunpoint. iraqis will pay for all the Halliburton yachts with the schools, hospitals and highways they won’t be able to build. American soldiers are paying for it by dying and the iraqi children may or may not be paying for it with sodimized abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. We will all pay for it for generations because of all the ill-will we’re earning and the ignorance we’re sowing. How many times do we need to prove that war is just another racket?
An article on abuse of prisoners in the U.S. in the NY Times shows that Lane McCotter, the man who oversaw the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in iraq, was forced to resign a U.S. prison post “after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.” It was Attorney General John Ashcroft who hand-picked the officials who went to iraq.
As an American I’m ashamed but not terribly surprised to see what happened in the U.S.-run prisons in iraq. Militaries are institutions designed to command with force and only civilian oversight will ultimately keep any military insitution free from this sort of abuse. The Red Cross had warned of prisoner mistreatment but was largely ignored. Abu Ghraib is in the news in part because of a leaked Pentagon report, yet it’s only after CBS News aired the pictures and the New Yorker quoted parts of the reports and turned it into a scandal that President Bush or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted to the problems and gave their half-hearted apologies.
This is not to say all soldiers are abusive or all prison guards are abusive. Most soldiers and most guards are good, decent people, serving out of call to duty and (often) because of economic necessities. But when the system is privatized and kept secret, we allow for corruption that put even the good people in positions where they are pressured to do wrong.
It is precisely because the Pentagon instinctively keeps reports like the one on the abuse conditions inside the Abu Ghraib prison secret that conditions are allowed to get this bad. That prison, along with the one at Guantanamo Bay remain largely off-limits to international law. It was probably only a few Americans that gave the orders for the abuse but it was many more who followed and many many more—all of us in one way or another—who have gave the go-ahead with our inattention to issues of justice in prisons.
The Gutless Pacifist talks about the abuse of iraqi prisoners and asks How high up does it go?
There are many troubling political issues coming out of both the reports of abuse in iraq and earlier reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay (which are looking increasingly accurate). But what is even more troubling to me is the larger moral issue that each of us who are Americans may be in part responsible for these atrocities. For it is we who have allowed a culture of death and violence to develop.
Meanwhile, a report on the abuses by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba is chilling in its detailing of physical and psychologial torture reportedly taking place at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad.
Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo is keeping close tabs on developments and reactions in Washington, including the President’s:
The disasters now facing the country in iraq — some in slow motion, others by quick violence — aren’t just happening on the president’s watch. They are happening in a real sense, really in the deepest sense, because of him — because of his attention to the simulacra of leadership rather than the real thing, which is more difficult and demanding, both personally and morally.
Don’t miss Marshall’s thoughtful comparison of President Bush to a bad C.E.O..
The other essential reading on all this is Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article on the torture at Abu Ghraib.
Here’s a website of Jeremy Hinzman, a U.S. Army soldier who became a a conscientious objector in the course of his service. His applications denied, he moved to Canada and is seeking political asylum there.
I find I can understand the issues all too well. In only a slightly-parallel universe, I’d be in iraq myself instead of publishing Nonviolence.org. My father, a veteran who fought in the South Pacific in World War II, really wanted me to join the U.S. Navy and attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis. For quite some time, I seriously considered it. I am attracted to the idea of service and duty and putting in hard work for something I believe in.
Hinzman’s story is getting a lot of mainstream coverage, I suspect because the “escape to Canada” angle has so many Vietnam-era echoes that resonate with that generation. I wish Hinzman would flesh out his website story though. His Frequently Asked Questions leaves out some important details that could really make the story—why did he join the Army in the first place, what were some of the experiences that led him to rethink his duty, etc. I’d recommend Jeff Paterson’s Gulf War Refusenik site, which includes lots of stories including his own:
“What am I going to do with my life?” has always been huge question of youth, and today in the wake of the horror and tragedy of New York September 11th this question has increased importance for millions of young people. No one who has seen the images will ever forget… If I hadn’t spent those four years in the Marine Corps, I might be inclined to fall into line now. Most of the time my unit trained to fight a war against peasants who dared to struggle against “American interests” in their homelands-specifically Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala… Faced with this reality, I began the process of becoming un-American-meaning that the interests of the people of the world began to weigh heavier than my self-interest. I realized that the world did not need or want another U.S. troop…
There are bound to be more stories all the time of service-people who find a different reality when they land on foreign shores. How many will rethink their relationship to the U.S. military. How many will follow Paterson’s example of becoming “un-American”?
From the Mordechai Vanunu site:
“PEACE HERO” MORDECHAI VANUNU, LEAVING PRISON IN HOURS, WILL BE GREETED BY WHITE DOVES, FLOWERS… AND YET MORE PUNISHMENT
In less than twelve hours, Israel’s captive Mordechai Vanunu is to walk out of Shikma Prison, where his home was a cell for the last 18 years. Over 100 international anti-nuclear, peace and human rights activists, and at least as many Israeli supporters of the nuclear whistleblower will assemble outside the prison gate at 8:00 am Wednesday morning
Then the leash stiffens, and the collar tightens. Although his full sentence has been served and all his secrets have been told, Mordechai Vanunu’s next punishment is to shun all contact with foreigners and most modern communications while confined to the city of Jaffa for one year. He is denied his passport and is forbidden to enter embassies or approach borders and airports. He may not talk to Israelis about his work at the nuclear weapons factory in Dimona, nor even recite his published revelations from the pages of the London Sunday Times in October, 1986.
The big news is more terror, over 190 dead in Spain. Violence is being used to wage politics yet again. As I write, conflicting reports on the terrorists’ identities are still coming through.
Spain Struggles to Absorb Worst Terrorist Attack in Its History
In the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history, at least 10 bombs exploded during rush hour today in three commuter train stations here. The Interior Ministry said 190 people were killed and more than 1,200 wounded.
The War Resisters League has issued its famous “Pie Chart” flyer showing Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes. An annual tradition, this flyer breaks down U.S. government spending.
This year 49% of income-tax generated federal spending is going to the military. That’s $536 billion for current military spending, $349 billion to pay for past military spending and a projected $50 billion that the President will ask Congress for after the elections.
There’s just so much wrong with this amount of miliary spending. This is money that could be going into job creation, into supporting affordable health care for Americans, into giving our kids better education. The strongest defense a country could ever have is investing in its people, but that’s impossible if we’re spending half of our taxes on bombs. And having all these bombs around makes us itchy to use them and gives us the ability to fight wars largely by ourselves.
The WRL flyer always goes beyond mere number crunching, however, to show some of the human impact of this inbalanced spending. This time we have listings of “lives lost in Afghanistan & iraq,” lives lost due to poor health standards around the world, the lost freedom of prisoners being held by the U.S. against the Geneva Accords, and the friends “lost and found” by the U.S.’s unilateralist war.