Month: December 2005

Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy died yesterday at the age of 89. Reactions here.

Last June, Patrick Buchanan asked, “Who is the Eugene McCarthy of this generation?” In a June 2004 interview with Salon.com, McCarthy explained his decision to challenge LBJ on an antiwar platform:

I thought someone ought to challenge this ridiculous war, and I also thought a great deal about the domestic agitation and confusion. And I realized the Senate wasn’t going to do it when [it failed] to repeal the 1965 Tonkin Gulf Authorization. The repeal got five votes. That was in ’67; it wasn’t like 1965 when people still believed the Tonkin Resolution was the real thing. And I said, I guess a number of times, that one of the principal responsibilities the Senate had is to be involved in a serious way in foreign policy, and that the ultimate act of foreign policy is war. Therefore the Senate had a special responsibility when war comes to say, “Do we want it? Is it in the interest of the country?” And I thought that we’d reached that point and passed it and, well, it sounds self-serving, but if the Senate wouldn’t do it, that didn’t excuse me for not doing it. Because one senator could take responsibility for the whole body if he wanted to fulfill his constitutional duties.

John Nichols eulogizes the poet-statesman here.

I just now read Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s note at Liberty and Power that Bill Bradford, editor of Liberty Magazine, lost his life to cancer on Thursday, December 8. He was 58.

I am very sad to hear this. I had the pleasure of meeting Bill at the LP National Convention in Atlanta in 2004, and was fortunate to write several book reviews for Liberty over the last couple years.

Bill Bradford, on top of being a dedicated hard-working libertarian editor, was very strongly opposed to the war machine. I had several long conversations with him on the phone and he told me more than once that there wasn’t a war in the U.S. government’s history that he thought was necessary and unavoidable — that there was always a better way than war to achieve the desired results. We have lost, among other things, another force for peace with his death.

This morning, Rational Review reports the untimely death of R.W. Bradford, publisher of Liberty magazine. He was 58 and had fought heroically against cancer for many months.

I first met Bill Bradford 26 years ago. He was a dedicated and unwavering fighter for liberty and peace. The libertarian and antiwar movements have lost a great friend.

Thanks to Tom Knapp, Jeff Riggenbach, and Stephen Cox for transmitting this sad information.

Saturday from 6-8 pm EST on the Weekend Interview Show, I’ll be talking with Larisa Alexandrovna from Raw Story about the Fitzgerald investigation and related matters. Then in the second hour, my friend Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute will return to discuss the question of whether the state really protects anyone at all.

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Then at 9 pm EST, Karen Kwiatkowski, host of the new show American Forum, will be interviewing persecuted non-commissioned officer Al Lorentz, author of this great essay about the disaster in Iraq.

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General Ante Gotovina, hunted by the Hague Inquisition over his role in the 1995 blitzkrieg against the Krajina Serbs, was arrested in the Canary Islands (Spain) on Wednesday evening.

Croatian authorities, who have steadfastly maintained that Gotovina was not in Croatia, breathed a sigh of relief. But Gotovina’s arrest, for all the pleasure that it gives the Head Inquisitor Carla Del Ponte, will have interesting political side-effects.

For years now, Washington and Brussels have been using Gotovina as leverage against Zagreb, invoking Croatia’s “cooperation” with the Inquisition (or lack thereof) whenever they wanted something. Now that Gotovina has been arrested, that leverage is gone.

As for Gotovina personally, he’s got reason to hope. Just last week, the Inquisition acquitted top KLA commanders of running a torture camp, and
sent them back to Kosovo for victory parades. Their indictments were used as an example of ICTY’s “fairness” and “impartiality,” aimed at Serbia, just as Gotovina’s indictment was. Perhaps a couple months from now, Gotovina will also be acquitted for lack of evidence, so the Inquisition could get back to its appointed task of blaming everything in the Balkans on the Serbs.

Remember the mystery surrounding the crash of the British RAF Hercules on Purple Finger Day in Iraq? It was widely reported as a shootdown, but of course, we’ve had to wait for the “facts” to be determined by the state. Here, nearly a year later, is the official pronouncement:

The RAF Hercules plane which crashed in Iraq killing 10 British servicemen in January had come under “hostile fire”, Defence Secretary John Reid has said.

Mr Reid said the investigation board had concluded “the aircraft crashed because it became uncontrollable after hostile ground to air fire.”

Other British reports give more details, though they are apparently not going to be confirmed by the official report.

IRAQI rebels used a heavy machinegun to down a British C-130 transport, killing all 10 servicemen on board, a newspaper reported today, quoting the results of a 10-month probe.
[…]
A ministry of defence spokesman said he could not confirm the accuracy of the report in The Sun, but added there would be a briefing tomorrow on the findings of the investigation into the January 30 crash near Baghdad.

At least one round, probably from a Soviet-made Dshke heavy calibre machine-gun, penetrated the fuel tank in the plane’s right wing during the incident, according to investigators quoted by the newspaper.

The “very lucky shot” caused a massive explosion that sent the four-engined Hercules plummeting to the ground in a fireball, it said.

The plane was “hedge-hopping” – flying fast and low in a combat zone, usually a highly effective means of avoiding enemy ground fire, the newspaper said.

The downed aircraft was on a 70km flight north from Baghdad to the major coalition special forces base at Balad. The Sun said it belonged to the RAF’s elite 47 squadron, who move elite forces soldiers covertly all over the world.

The defence ministry has declined to comment on reports that members of Britain’s elite Special Air Service were aboard the flight.