What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.

I mention this toward the end of my review of The Burglary, the story of the 1971 antiwar activists, and it’s something I’ve been trying to pull from potential authors as we’ve put together an August Friends Journal issue on war. Much of the day-to-day mechanics of war has changed drastically in the past 40 years—at least for American soldiers.

We have stories like this one from the NYTimes: drone operators in suburban U.S. campuses killing people on the other side of the planet. But soldiers in Baghdad have good cell phone coverage, watch Netflix, and live in air conditioned barracks. The rise of contractors means that most of the grunt work of war—fixing trucks, peeling potatoes—is done by nearly invisible non-soldiers who are living in these war zones. It must be nice to have creature comforts but I’d imagine it could make for new problems psychologically integrating a war zone with normalcy.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we’re all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it’s yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn’t anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? “Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.” And yet… it’s clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever “confessions” can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it’s also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It’s hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it’s could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

Here’s links to recent articles on the situation: https://delicious.com/martin_kelley/news.cpt-four.foxmemorial

And a personal note from Nonviolence.org’s Martin Kelley: I myself am a Christian and Quaker and one of our folks, Tom Fox, of Langley Hill (Virginia) Friends Meeting is among the hostages. I don’t know Tom personally but over the last few days I’ve learned we have many Friends in common and they have all testified to his deep committment to peace. Some of the links above are more explicitly Quaker than most things I post to Nonviolence.org, but they give perspective on why Tom and his companions would see putting themselves in danger as an act of religious service. I am grateful for Tom’s current witness in iraq–yes, even as a hostage–but I certainly hope he soon comes back to his family and community and that the attention and witness of these four men’s ordeal helps to bring the news of peace to streets and halls of Baghdad, Washington, London and Ottawa.

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Nothing’s really changed now except U.S. political interests. Hussein is still a tyrant. He’s still stockpiling chemical weapons. Why are U.S. political interests different now? Why does Bill Clinton want U.S. media attention focused on Iraq? Look no further than Big Bill’s zipper. Stop the next war before it starts. Abolish everyone’s weapons of mass destruction and let’s get a President who doesn’t need a war to clear his name.

I put this at the bottom of the piece because then the idea that Clinton might have done this was still way out there.

Since then most every major turning point in the President’s scandals has been echoed by military maneuverings.

On August 17th Clinton gave a televised address which was widely criticized as being “too little, too late” and non-repentant enough. Public opinion turned sharply against him. Three days later Big Bill sent 100 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan in order to assassinate Osama bin Laden, the previously unknown archenemy of the United States.

And now, on the afternoon before the House of Representatives was scheduled to begin proceedings on his Impeachment, Clinton has ordered an attack on Iraq. Congress will of course delay the vote. Rumors are that this new bombing campaign might last more than a few days, and come January’s new Congressional term there will be five less Republicans.

Each time these coincidences happen, a few pundits that mutter about “Wag the Dog” scenarios before assuring the audience that Clinton would never do that. Everyone talks about coincidence and then moves on.

But coincidence has been Clinton’s friend throughout his scandals. Remember the long-lost Whitewater documents that mysteriously appeared on Hillary Clinton’s coffee-table when investigators were threatening to issue here a subpoena? Remember the job offers that Clinton cronies arranged for key witnesses just before they either recanted their stories or lied under oath? All of Clinton’s scandals have been of the “who cares” variety-shady land dealings twenty years ago in Arkansas, his having sex with an intern in the Oval Office. They displayed a lack of judgment and character, but were not Impeachable. But his scandals have grown and taken a life of their own as Clinton and his wife have been visited by an ever-growing amount of coincidences.

Enough is enough. How much more are we to believe? As I write this the missiles are screaming over Baghdad and Iraqis are dying horrible deaths. This is real. This is not some political game. It is time for Americans to stop denying that these coincidences are really coincidental.

It is time to demand Clinton’s resignation.

And if he refuses, then it is time to subpoena White House records on the last year of military actions. If they show that Clinton has murdered in his desperate attempt to save his Presidency, then it is time not only to impeach him but to put him into jail.

U.S. officials said that they were about to attack Saturday night, Nov. 14, when Hussein agreed to the inspections. One Pentagon official is quoted as saying “It was almost as if he knew,” which is a ridiculous statement considering that rumors of an imminent attack were circling the internet and news sites all weekend. Of course Hussein knew, we all did.

This should be cause for rejoicing. Blood won’t have to be shed, diplomacy (notably France and Russia’s) have saved the day again, and the U.N. teams can go back to work.

But U.S. administration officials are upset. They wanted a war. They’re double-guessing their timing, wishing they had bombed him earlier this week. They’re implying that they might bomb Baghdad anyway. They’re whining that now they have to once again work with the U.N. and with Iraqi officials.

Why is the Administration so upset? It’s because they have no real policy in the Gulf. Earlier this week they admitted that they didn’t know what they would do after the attack. Here they were sending warships and personnel into the Gulf and they had no long- or mid-term vision for what these people were going to do after the first hundred cruise missiles went off. U.S. policy is once more stuck in the same muddle its been in since mid-1991.

Clinton wishes Hussein would just disappear. That his military would launch a coup and drive him from power. That a cruise missile would hit and kill him. They wish that Iraqi military know-how would disappear. But none of this is likely to happen. In the real world, high-tech U.S. missiles can’t do very much. The real world requires diplomacy, negotiating with people you don’t trust, de-escalating rhetoric. These are skills that the Clinton Administration needs to develop.

It is time for the U.S. to stop whining when diplomacy works. And it is time for a U.S. to develop a realistic policy for building a lasting peace in the Gulf.

We’re told it’s because U.N. inspectors believe that Iraq has hidden “weapons of mass destruction.” But of course so does the United States. And Britain, France, Russia, the Ukraine, China, India and Pakistan. Iraq doesn’t even hold a regional monopoly, as Israel certainly has atomic weapons atop U.S.-designed rockets aimed this very moment at Hussein’s Baghdad palaces.

Insanely-destructive weapons are a fact of life in the fin-de-Millennium. There’s already plenty of countries with atomic weapons and the missile systems to lob them into neighboring countries. Hussein probably doesn’t have them, and the weapons U.N. inspectors are worried about are chemical. This is the “poor man’s atomic bomb,” a way to play at the level of nuclear diplomacy without the expenses of a nuclear program.

Clinton seems oblivious to the irony of opposing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction with our own. The aircraft carriers and battle fleets that have been sent into the Gulf in recent weeks are loaded with tactical nuclear missiles.

If the possession of weapons of mass destruction is wrong for Iraq, then it is wrong for everyone. It is time to abolish all weapons programs and to build real world peace along lines of cooperation.

He’s our Bully

Most Americans, on hearing a call to let Hussein be, will react with disbelief. Conditioned to think of him as our modern Hitler, anyone opposing a new Gulf War must be crazy, someone unfamiliar with the history of the appeasement of Hitler prior to World War II that allowed him to build his military to the frightening levels of 1939.

But Americans have alas not been told too much of more recent history. Saddam Hussein is our creation, he’s our bully. It started with Iran. Obsessed with global military control, the U.S. government started arming regional superpowers. We gave our chosen countries weapons and money to bully around their neighbors and we looked the other way at human rights abuses. We created and strengthened dictators around the world, including the Shah of Iran. A revolution finally threw him out of power and ushered in a government understandable hostile to the United States.

Rather than take this development to mean that the regional superpower concept was a bad idea, the U.S. just chose another regional superpower: Iraq. We looked the other way when the two got into a war, and started building up Iraq’s military arsenal, giving him the planes and military equipment we had given Iran. This was a bloody, crazy war, where huge casualties would be racked up only to move the front a few miles, an advance that would be nullified when the other army attacked with the same level of casualties. The United States supported that war. International human rights activists kept publicizing the abuses within Iraq, and denouncing him for use of chemical weapons. They got little media attention because it was not in U.S. political interests to fight Hussein.

Nothing’s really changed now except U.S. political interests. Hussein is still a tyrant. He’s still stockpiling chemical weapons. Why are U.S. political interests different now? Why does Bill Clinton want U.S. media attention focused on Iraq? Look no further than Big Bill’s zipper. Stop the next war before it starts. Abolish everyone’s weapons of mass destruction and let’s get a President who doesn’t need a war to clear his name.