Judge Andrew Napolitano interviews Kelley Vlahos on Barack Obama’s order to assassinate American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
Surge Lies Come Home to Haunt Us
Chicago’s South Side is indulging itself in a bit of nostalgia for the ’80s and ’90s. Michelle Obama’s hood is overrun with gang-related murders; deaths are at the same rate as US soldiers dying in both major theaters of the US’ “War on Terror.” Government must do something, declares two Illinois state senators who represent parts of the city. I know — a good old fashioned military occupation, like what worked so well in our wars and Kent State and whatnot.
“John Fritchley and LaShawn Ford, Democrats who represent the north and west sides of the city, said troops were needed to ‘stabilize communities’ in Chicago just as they had done in Iraq and Afghanistan,” explains the Telegraph.
These men are talking about the “surge,” or what those of us against the war labeled “escalation.” Iraq was in the throes of vicious violence that was killing over a thousand civilians (and who knows how many others who were labeled militants for intermittent or single acts of resistance) per month. The Bush Administration decided sending many tens of thousands more hastily trained troops into the mix would be a great idea, ignoring the fact that much of the violence was likely due to the presence of foreign troops. The troops were sent >> fast-forward >> violence is down in Iraq! The surge worked!
What’s missing in that fast-forward blip is what really happened in 2007. Many — most? –Americans can’t usually be bothered with the truth, especially when it’s all long and stuff. Recap:
1) Sadr ordered his men to stand down, apparently sickened by the recent violence between his followers, and other Shi’ites and the government.
2) The Awakening (Sahwa) councils, Sunni groups who were revolting against al-Qaeda-in-Iraq’s senseless slaughters, began receiving large sums of money from the US to only fight AQI, and not US troops as well, as they had been doing. The verdict is yet out on what happens when the money stops and Maliki, or whoever is in power, decides to turn on this now-well-trained movement.
3) This is the big one: the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad was essentially complete. No more violence was necessary for many partisan sectarians. Juan Cole did some extra parsing of this in 2008.
All of these pointy complicated facts were mushed into a smooth ball for easier digestion — our Glorious Soldiers had won the day. If you disagree you’re a commie or a terrorist symp who hates America. This actually succeeded in convincing some antiwar types, if I recall.
Candidate Obama, however, seemed not to be fooled. Then, when it was no longer politically tenable, he changed his mind. We now know this is Obama’s typical flip-flopping treachery, but this was one of his first major public instances. And now he’s got his own surge.
For their parts, reports the Chicago Tribune, the mayor and the governor oppose adding another layer of force to Chicago’s already well-armored police.
“You have to look at long-term solutions. You can’t just put something temporary in there,” said Mayor Richard Daley. “People have to get involved in their community, family by family and block by block.”
Chicago police are trained in the state and federal constitutions, says Mark Donahue, president of the city’s police union.
“With the guard coming in, it’s making a statement that your constitutional rights will be diminished,” Donahue said. “They don’t have the training that Chicago police officers do.”
The governor can send the Guard troops in, but in this case will only do so at Daley’s request.
So should we add PTSD-affected soldiers to the ranks of possibly also-traumatized police on the admittedly well-armed but nonetheless civilian streets of Chi-town? That’s a surge I don’t see working well. But maybe when the violence ends once everyone kills each other, they’ll proclaim another “mission accomplished.”
If troops end up occupying our cities, it will be thanks to simplistic lies told by men with authoritarian minds. We can blame President Barack Obama for backing up Bush’s surge fairy tales and painting military intervention a panacea for all threats, foreign and domestic. It’s now okay for Americans across the political spectrum to trust guns and bombs as an organizing principle of civilization.
Univ. of Wisc. Cancels Antiwar Forum Over ‘Security Concerns’
An Antiwar Forum was canceled at the last minute by the University of Wisconsin (Madison) over unspecified “security concerns.”
The event was expected to draw a large audience to hear Cindy Sheehan, Antiwar.com’s Angela Keaton, Ben Manski of the Liberty Tree Foundation, Christina Tobin of the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, and local activist and elected official Sean Scallon.
The practice of canceling or prohibiting events based on “security concerns” is not new, but hasn’t been used much recently. The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear, in its Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (505 U.S. 123, 1992) decision, that “Speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob.”
Organizers of the event plan to hold it in an area outside the student union.
Following is the press release of the UW Campus Antiwar Network:
UW Campus Antiwar Network: Antiwar panel scheduled for Monday at 7:00 at Memorial Union featuring activist Cindy Sheehan cancelled by union staff due to “security concerns”
4/25/2010
CONTACT: Steve Horn — (262)-705-5856, sahorn@wisc.edu
To Members of the Press:
An antiwar panel sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Havens Center, Campus Antiwar Network, Middle East Interest Group, and the Wisconsin Union Directorate’s Society and Politics Committee and scheduled for Monday, April 26 at 7:00 PM in Memorial Union has been cancelled by the Union Building/Event Management Director, Roger Vogts, due to a last-minute expression of “security concerns” that would accompany antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan’s visit. Vogts said that he could not contact security over the weekend because, apparently, phones don’t work over the weekend.
On top of that, those organizing the event would have to foot the bill for the security, even though Sheehan never requested security to begin with, and even though no organizations involved with this event had enough money to foot the expensive bill this late in the game, either.
The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear, in its Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (505 U.S. 123, 1992) decision, that “Speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob” (emphasis mine). Since the Union’s Central Reservations presides over a viewpoint-neutral limited public forum at the Union and other facilities, the Union is necessarily bound by the same constitutional demands as the local government in Forsyth County. In other words, it is unconstitutional for any viewpoint-neutral limited public forum to deny any organization their free speech rights on the grounds that they are unable to provide for extra security costs related to the exercise of that free speech.
Interestingly, these same concerns were not expressed when Norman Finkelstein came to Madison on April 13 and spoke at UW, a man well-known for being a strong critic of Israel’s and a man barred from visiting Israel until 2018 because the country considers him a “security threat.” Not a peep was uttered about him being such a thing at UW.
The panel features across-the-political-spectrum activists who believe it will take massive electoral reform to engender a sustainable long-term antiwar movement in the United States:
* Christina Tobin: chair of the Free and Equal Elections Foundation (www.freeandequal.org), a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the rights of the politically marginalized and disenfranchised, particularly third party and independent voters and candidates. She is also the Libertarian candidate for California Sec. of State.
* Teresa Amato: served as national campaign manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader in his 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. She’s the author of Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny.
* Angela Keaton: development director for Antiwar.com, the Web’s leading source of antiwar news, views, and activities, and the producer of the Scott Horton Show for Antiwar Radio.
* Ben Manski: attorney and pro-democracy advocate, he serves as Executive Director for the Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution, a think-tank and organizing center he founded in 2004. He’s also a principal attorney at Manski Law and Communications, LLC, and an associate follow with the Institute for Policy Studies. In 2001-2002, he was active on the steering committee that formed the major U.S. peace organization, United for Peace and Justice.
* Sean Scallon: author, journalist, blogger, and elected official in Pepin, WI. He’s the author of Beating the Powers that Be: Independent Political Movements and the Parties of the Upper Midwest.Despite this cancellation, the organizing committee of this event and the panel has decided that the event will still take place at the Union, only, it will not be held in a reserved room, but instead, in one of three places: a.) the front steps, b.) the Union Lobby, c,) Lakefront on Langdon in the Union.
Event attendees are set to meet at the front steps of the Union at 6:45 PM, and from there, the panel will either be held there, in the Union lobby, or in Lakefront on Langdon in the Union. At the time this press release was written, event organizers were still undecided as to whether they would bring a lawsuit on the grounds of a violation of the First Amendment against the Union.
For more information about the event, please visit the Facebook Event Page.
Don’t Repeal DADT
I like this theme, and have written about it here before, as has Justin Raimondo. Simply: the world isn’t made more just for gay people by inclusiveness being extended to history’s largest murder organization. Lesbians don’t have an equal right to kill. It’s not progressive to include transsexuals in the American project to garrison the globe. And so on. To promote this theme, and to culture-jam in general, I made a page on Facebook entitled Don’t Repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which includes a few links to sympathetic essays. So far, it’s a few people I know and some other general military or christianist flunkies who don’t seem to have even glanced at the content. The description is clear:
“In the fight for equality, gay people now claim the right to join in our government’s pointless, counterproductive, and expensive wars. This page is for those who think the equal right to kill isn’t something worth fighting for.”
I invite those who agree to “Like” the page, join in the discussion, and make this a more well-known position. US-Liberal types embrace gays in the military automatically, unthinkingly — “gay” = “good.” But gays who kill for the state are killers like anyone else.
IVAW/LOLA Peace Mission to Iraq
Representatives of the Iraq Veterans Against the War and the Ladies of Liberty Alliance, including conscientious objector Tracey Harmon (pictured below), are spreading the message of freedom to Iraq – not with war, but with peace.
Tracey writes via Freedom’sPhoenix:
“Here’s the first round of pictures. These were taken outside of one of Saddam’s torture prisons. We’ll be visiting the refugee villages in the next couple of days.”
Ms. Harmon will be joining me and Angela Keaton on Antiwar Radio this Friday.
CNAS Report is a Sign of the Times
For another data point on the marked shift in American discourse on Israel/Palestine that has been occurring in recent years, check out the new report on “Setting the Conditions for a Palestinian State†that was released today by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). The report lays out the framework for the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to enforce a potential two-state solution in Israel/Palestine.
As is so often the case, what’s important here is not what is being said, but rather who is saying it. CNAS was founded in 2007 by Michele Flournoy (now the Obama administration’s undersecretary of defense for policy and rumored to be a potential successor to Robert Gates) and Kurt Campbell (now a top Asia hand at the State Department), who were only two of the nearly dozen CNAS vets to join the Obama administration. A major part of the reason for CNAS’s pipeline into the administration is the organization’s success in portraying itself as the home of “serious†liberals that even a hawk could respect. Without detracting from the organization’s fellows, many of whom are genuinely excellent, it is fair to say that CNAS has strived to cultivate an reputation for technocratic problem-solving rather than ideological liberalism. The organization did not make its name with outspoken denunciations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; it made its name with pragmatic recommendations for how to wage the wars more effectively. (The fact that the organization formed and its leadership came to public prominence well after the wars were already underway means that we will never know whether many of its leaders would have favored the wars in the first place.) In particular, CNAS has carved out a niche as the think-tank of choice for proponents of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, currently enjoying something of a renaissance in popularity; CNAS’s current president, Lt. Col. (ret.) John Nagl, helped write the military’s counterinsurgency field manual under General David Petraeus.
CNAS’s apparent aversion to political risk-taking makes it all the more surprising to see the organization wade into the fray on Israel/Palestine — and particularly to raise the once-taboo issue of an international peacekeeping force to enforce a two-state agreement. Coming on the heels of the recent controversy surrounding Petraeus’s own views on Israel/Palestine — he came under fire from hawks for suggesting [PDF, p. 12] that the perpetuation of the conflict harms U.S. interests — the release of the CNAS report suggests two things. First, there is a growing belief both in the military and in Washington national-security circles that the status quo on Israel/Palestine is unacceptable and that assertive US action is necessary to change it. Second, there is a diminishing level of fear about the political consequences of making such beliefs public.