Author: Eric Garris

Ron Paul on foreign policy:

I was sad to read this morning of the death of Carl Oglesby, one of the great leaders of the early Vietnam antiwar movement.

Oglesby was a leader and one-time president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SDS was the leading antiwar students group in the 1960s until factional politics caused the implosion of the group in 1969. Another SDS leader once described the makeup of SDS: “We have within our ranks Communists of both varieties, socialists of all sorts, 3 or 4 different kinds of anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, syndicalists, social democrats, humanist liberals, a growing number of ex-YAF libertarian laissez-faire capitalists, and, of course, the articulate vanguard of the psychedelic liberation front.”

I joined my high school’s SDS in late 1968 and was quite active until shortly after the split in the national organization (and subsequently, the local Los Angeles high school group). My attraction to the organization was its mass-based approach under the leadership of Oglesby.

Oglesby was a proponent of working with libertarians and conservative antiwar activists in such groups as Young Americans for Freedom on war and other issues. He argued that “the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.”

In his essay “Vietnamese Crucible,” published in the 1967 volume Containment and Change, Oglesby rejected the “socialist radical, the corporatist conservative, and the welfare-state liberal” and challenged the New Left to embrace “American democratic populism” and “the American libertarian right.”

Oglesby was expelled from SDS in 1969, after more left-wing members accused him of “being ‘trapped in our early, bourgeois stage’ and for not progressing into ‘a Marxist-Leninist perspective.'”

Oglesby later became a writer, a musician, and an academic. He wrote several books on the JFK assassination and American class analysis. He also recorded two albums, roughly in the folk-rock genre. He taught politics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College.

Oglesby was friends with Murray Rothbard and other libertarian leaders. Rothbard wrote approvingly of Oglesby’s writings, particularly his books The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Containment and Change.

In a later work, Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement, Oglesby said that two historians “rang his bell”: “One was the liberal William Appleman Williams, and the other was the conservative Murray Rothbard. They were both libertarians, and that is what I had begun calling myself. I still do. Libertarianism is a stance that allows one to speak to the right as well as to the left, which is what I was always trying to do.”

Oglesby’s fight to broaden and open the antiwar movement is still being waged today. We can hope that people will remember the lessons of SDS’s demise and advance beyond sectarianism.

Additional reading:

Jesse Walker’s obituary of Oglesby at Reason.com

Bill Kauffman interviews Oglesby (2008)

Murray Rothbard on The New Left

At the GOP debate last night:

Yesterday there were two “security threats” where F16 fighter jets were scrambled to escort airliners after “terror threats” were declared.

In the widely-reported “breaking” story, a pair of fighter jets were scrambled to escort an American Airlines jet into New York’s JFK airport. Three people were reported “detained.”

We now learn that the pilot became spooked by passengers’ frequent trips to and from the restroom. Federal air marshals aboard flight 34 from Los Angeles to JFK were able to resolve the situation when the passengers complied with their instructions, police officials said. The pilot then radioed that the situation was under control and the plane landed safely. Three male passengers were questioned upon arrival (not really “detained”), but no charges were filed against them, authorities said.

The second incident requiring fighter jets involved two people aboard that plane were “allegedly behaving suspiciously,” according to the FBI spokesperson in Denver, Dave Joly. The plane was met in the Detroit airport by law enforcement and taken to a remote area for a security screening, but no explosives were found, Joly said.

Instead, the “suspicious behavior” was two people “making out” in the bathroom mid-flight, law enforcement sources told ABC News. Three people were taken into custody for questioning (three?), Frontier Airlines said in a statement, but no arrests have been made in that case either.

Thank goodness for the federal government keeping us safe!

Judge Andrew Napolitano talks about the lessons learned from 9/11, the loss of liberty and the search for truth:

Update:Transcript of Remembering 9/11: Life, Liberty & Truth

Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Is the loss of life on 9/11 a justification for the loss of freedom that the Bill of Rights guarantees? Tonight, life, liberty, and truth.

Sunday is the tenth anniversary of 9/11. One decade later, Americans are still struggling to understand what happened. What will we remember and what will future generations come to believe about 9/11? Will it be the loss of life on that day, or will it be the even greater loss of life in the global conflicts that directly ensued? Will it be the short term security precautions such as the orders to shoot down any planes carrying innocent civilians, or will it be the lingering destruction of our rights to privacy from unlawful government surveillance, the institutionalization of government torture, and the government-generated semi-nudity and near sexual assaults at our airports? Will future generations ever know the full truth about the events that led to 9/11, or will they accept the government account of what happened; an account that the CIA’s own Bin Laden unit chief, Michael Scheuer, calls a “whitewash from top to bottom.”

In the years preceding 9/11, Osama bin Laden was a young freedom-fighter who promised American officials he’d help them to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. Following the defeat of the Soviets and the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism was triumphant and Communism was gone. But in 1991, when the United States invaded Iraq for the first time, we established military bases in the land revered by Islam. Furious at the American government for desecrating their lands, Bin Laden and his maniacal associates began plans that would lead to the clash of civilizations that culminated in the tragic events of 9/11.

The signs of trouble were apparent after the bombings of American embassies in Africa and the initial bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. It has now become increasingly clear that the Clinton administration should have done something. Michael Scheuer claims that Bin Laden was identified as the mastermind of those attacks and was targeted multiple times and could have been captured and tried for these assaults; but President Clinton himself said: NO .

Last year, retired Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a career intelligence officer, wrote a book titled “Operation Dark Heart”, in which he shows that during his time serving on the secret Able Danger Project, he and his colleagues identified Mohammad Atta, the key 9/11 hijacker involved in the planes that struck the towers, a year before he struck. And they found him in America. Although Col. Shaffer fought to bring this to the 9/11 Commission and was told he would testify, he was eventually turned away and none of this intelligence was given to the American people. It was literally the politicians covering for each other because they failed to protect us.

How many government agents and bureaucrats have been fired for being asleep at the switch on 9/11? Answer: NONE. How many persons have been prosecuted for failing to do their duty in the years preceding 9/11? Answer: NONE. How many persons have been tried for committing the attacks on 9/11? Answer: NONE. Why is the government afraid of the truth?

In the days after 9/11, while the country wept and the war hawks screamed for blood, one quiet voice rang out from the despair and offered a simple solution to solve our problems in a manner set forth in the Constitution. Texas Congressman Ron Paul offered legislation to authorize the President to send paid assassins to capture or kill Bin Laden and his cohorts. It would have cost a few hundred thousand dollars, instead of the two trillion that Presidents Bush and Obama have borrowed and spent on the wars in the Middle East. But that voice was drowned out in the ocean of tears and cries for blood and occupation and regime change. The bill failed and the wars came, and the blood flowed, and the borrowing of cash couldn’t come fast enough.

Now here we stand a decade after the attacks with thousands more dead and a bill for $2 trillion. What have we learned, America? Do they truly hate us for our freedoms or for our presence in their lands? Have the terrorists won by getting us to surrender our most basic rights in return for a false sense of security? Are the Constitution and our economy stronger now after this tragedy or are they infinitely weaker? We will continue to ask all this here on FreedomWatch.

We have never forgotten the victims who were slaughtered and the heroes who died trying to save them. The firefighters and police who responded will forever be iconic of the bravery that was necessary to save those who could be saved. And God bless the troops. They don’t belong there. When they leave, chaos will ensue. Though I profoundly reject their mission, I am in awe of the selfless men and woman who have served their country honorably and well.

One day our descendants will know the answers to all this.

Will you?

From Antiwar.com writer and ally Rick Rozoff:

WordPress suspended the Stop NATO site from posting any new material earlier today, with this announcement:

“Warning: We have a concern about some of the content on your blog. Please click here to contact us as soon as possible to resolve the issue and re-enable posting.”

Repeated efforts to contact them have produced no result.

A year ago Military Times threatened the Stop NATO e-mail list with legal action and, after contacting them and assuming the matter resolved, they got Yahoo Groups to threaten to shut down the list and even cancel my personal e-mail account.

Material on the WordPress site has been backed up, and everything posted to date is still accessible, but it’s not certain for how long.

As everyone familiar with both the site and the list know, no incitement to violence or other illegal action, no attempt to solicit money and no derogatory statement toward any demograhic group have ever appeared on either the mailing list or the news site.

The sole “crime” of which both are guilty is of being anti-war and anti-militarist.

Yours for peace,
Rick Rozoff