3 - 2011 - Antiwar.com Blog

Charles Peña on Fox Business Channel (video)

Antiwar.com columnist and Independent Institute senior fellow Charles Peña appeared last night on Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano on Fox Business Channel.

Peña responded to President Obama’s remarks on Libya. He appeared alongside Fox News’s Kirsten Powers.

Peña is former Senior Fellow with the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project, co-author of Exiting Iraq, and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

See also Charles Peña’s new article on the war in Libya, “The Libya Folly.”

Obama’s Biggest Scam?

Will Obama break all his past records for BS tonight when he gives his speech on Libya at 7:30 pm? (Eastern)

He will be speaking to the most servile audience he could find – uniformed military officers at the National Defense University. The room will be full of people who are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the government. The officers have spent their lives working for Uncle Sam, and they know that a single ill-time hoot during Obama’s talk could end their careers.

Obama is following in the footsteps of George W. Bush, who also used the uniformed officers as stage props for his most deceptive foreign policy addresses.

It is unfortunate that there is not a pervasive backlash against this type of exploitation. There no longer seems to be any BS radar regarding presidents and warring.

Eric Garris on CrossTalk About Libya (video)

Antiwar.com founder and managing editor Eric Garris appeared on Russia Today’s debate show, CrossTalk, to speak about Western intervention in Libya:

Spreading the love (of liberty) to the troops

Navy medic Daniel Lakemacher found a copy of Atlas Shrugged among the used books in his base quarters at Guantanamo Bay and it changed his life, literally. He left the military within a year as a conscientious objector, and has since been speaking to groups across the country about his experiences and his emboldened belief that “initiating force or fraud against other people is always wrong, every time. It doesn’t matter what costume you’re wearing, or who told you to do it, it’s still wrong.”

In the spirit of Lakemacher and others who have opened their minds to new ideas about war and peace while in the war zone, the gals over at LOLA (Ladies of Liberty Alliance) (disclosure: I’m on the advisory board) have been raising money to send care packages to troops overseas. According to LOLA development coordinator Nena Bartlett, each care package will contain the basics — snacks, candy, shaving kits, Q-tips — plus a copy of Atlas Shrugged and a pocket U.S Constitution, donated by Cato.

Bartlett said that while Lakemacher was certainly an inspiration, they don’t aim to shove any ideology down anyone’s throat — they just want to give liberty a chance. “We do not expect that anyone else will become a conscientious objector, nor is that our goal. We merely intend to inspire liberty in the minds of other soldiers."

For more info — and if you know a soldier who might appreciate such a gesture — contact Allison Gibbs at allison@iamlola.org.

Our Catastrophe, and Theirs

Nicholas Kristoff declares that “a humanitarian catastrophe has been averted for now,” and Dennis Ross claims 100,000 lives were saved by US intervention in Libya. Does any of this sound familiar? It’s precisely what the advocates of the bank bailout did. They came to Congress and the American public (and overseas too) and said: if you don’t give the banks and certain other favored mega-corporations $700 billion, financial Armageddon will ensue. After some reluctance, Congress caved — and, to this day, the TARPsters claim that, if not for the bailouit, we’d all be broke. Oh, wait — well, anyway, you get the point.

U.S ‘Allows’ Bravest Woman in Afghanistan to Visit

Under pressure from everyone, the State Department reversed an earlier decision to deny prominent Afghan activist Malalai Joya a visa for a three-week speaking tour for her new book, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice.” Joya told reporters last week that she was denied because — get this — she is “unemployed” and “lives underground.” Seeing that she is an accomplished author who has dodged fists and assassins, called a prostitute and communist and needs to live underground else she might die, this seemed weirdly obtuse if not petty.

That is if you weren’t familiar with Joya in the first place. She is one bad-ass woman, to put it plainly. And everyone has loved her for her brave and brutal verbal attacks on the corruption in the Afghan government and on the continued neglect of women’s rights. But “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” has also been a relentless critic of the continuing U.S military occupation in Afghanistan, and for that she had seemingly fallen from grace and into the status of a “problem,” one that cannot be allowed to infect our domestic audience with her authentic reaction to American policy in Afghanistan.

Joya’s supporters — of which there are many, obviously — rallied her cause in part by bombarding Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office with phone calls and emails. The decision to grant her a visa was made today, just before her scheduled speech at Harvard tomorrow. So the message managers engaging in their usual game of “preferred speakers” were not able to get away with it this time. It seems to me all too conspicuous that they would try to shut her out, after giving her visas for numerous previous trips to the U.S, just about the same time Gen. David Petraeus and Company were running around Washington trying to drum up positive reasons why we need to stay in Afghanistan.

Now let’s see if the corporate mainstream media gives her any coverage.