Category: Peace and War

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

35 years ago this month, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers–embarrassing documents showing how successive administrations from both parties lies us into Vietnam and kept us there.

Democracy Now had three of the players: Ellsberg himself, Senator (and current Presidential candidate) Mike Gravel, and the publisher of Beacon Press, which was sued by the government for doing the book version.

It reads like a spy novel, with all sorts of unbelievable intrigues and secrecies and plot twists. Someone could make a great movie out of it.

And of course, there are very relevant lessons for today’s society, as the Iraq war drags on and the pressure mounts to open yet another front against Iran.

Read, listen, or watch at democracynow.org–both for the drama and the history/current events lesson.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, Uncategorized

Kristol thinks GWB is a successful president and that we’re on track to win the war in Iraq. Hmmm–could’ve fooled me!

Can you say “hubris”? Gawd, what chutzpah. Arianna Huffington calls him “delusional”–and I think she is right!

Kristol writes in the original article:

What about terrorism? Apart from Iraq, there has been less of it, here and abroad, than many experts predicted on Sept. 12, 2001. So Bush and Vice President Cheney probably are doing some important things right. The war in Afghanistan has gone reasonably well.

What planet is he ON? Let’s see: subway bombings in London, commuter rail murder in Madrid, kidnappings and warlordism in Afghanistan (and Karzi hanging on for dear life), the most recent attempts in Glasgow…and let’s not even count Israel in the equation.

It’s this kind of very dangerous thinking that got us into a war we had no business being in, and made a complete shambles of things once we went in.

One place I agree with Kristol–this burden will be laid on the shoulders of the next president. Hopefully someone with the vision and strength of character to get us the heck out of there.

tags: Bill Kristol, William Kristol, Iraq, Afghanistan, Terrorism, George W. Bush, Arianna Huffington, Washington Post, Huffington Post

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, Uncategorized

Item: Rep. Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, notes that Vice President Cheney has been claiming an exemption for his office from the rules governing handling of classified information. Hmmm, didn’t Scooter Libby of the Veep’s office get sent to jail for just such a security breach? Perhaps that’s what Waxman means when he writes, “I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions. … [I]t would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that apply to all other executive branch officials.”

(This is one of several charges against Cheney by Waxman. Click here for the full list.)

Item: Bush nominated John Rizzo as the CIA’s General Counsel–yes, the same Rizzo who wrote to Gonzales that U.S. laws prohibiting torture “makes plain that it only prohibits extreme acts.”

Item: Yes, they’re finally talking about closing that disgrace and embarrassment of a torture center at Guantanamo…but opening up a new one in Afghanistan, no doubt so they can once again argue that U.S. law doesn’t apply.

Item: the U.S. is openly discussing, and has for six months, having U.S. military special operations forces working on American soil. I don’t know about you, but that makes me very nervous. Do we learn nothing from studying Hitler’s early years in power? Read Naomi Wolf’s “The End of America,” published by Chelsea Green. (I have sent an article about her to my webmaster for posting, but it hasn’t appeared yet.

Item: Cheney’s KBR (subsidiary of Halliburton) just got another fat military contract, shared with three other companies and totaling half a billion dollars. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

All of these were brought to my attention in just a single news bulletin from Citizens for Legitimate Government, which sends out several such bulletins every day. They follow the news closely and link to the original, mostly mainstream media, sources–as I have done here. Subscription costs nothing. Be informed, or be sorry later. (Standard disclaimers: my only connection is as a fairly recent subscriber.)

And why are the Democrats still funding the war? And why aren’t they talking about impeachment?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Peace and War, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized

About ten years ago, a local PR agency decided to subcontract some overload copywriting projects. She asked me if I wanted to try out wrking together. The first assignment she gave me was for a manufacturer of luggage–sounds innocuous enough, right? This was a local company, and I knew that they had a number of DOD contracts to make cases for weapons.

Well, when she sent me their sell sheets, they were so jingoistic and pro-war that they made me sick to even look at them.

I knew the PR agent was overwhelmed and didn’t want to mess her up (especially on the first project)–but after an hour of thinking about it, I realized there was no way I could work on this account–it was too at odds with my values.

So I very apologetically called the PR agency and told her I’d be glad to help her out, but not on this account, and sorry to strand her.

She immediately gave me a different account. I’ve never been sorry I turned that first one down.

OTOH, about a decade earlier, I did some work for Smith & Wesson involving sales materials for their police training program. The material was not rah rah, shooting is good–but emphasized the need for cops to be well-trained before being unleashed on the streets with lethal weapons. I decided that well-trained cops was an agenda I could support, at least to the point of doing this assignment.

In Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I go on at some length about when to say no to a sale. Discomfort with the politics of the client is a legitimate reason. At the same time, you don’t want to suddenly walk away from a big chunk of your income.

And this works two ways. Although I disagree with the position of making gay marriage illegal, I respect the right of a right-wing fundamentalist to say no to an account promoting gay marriage, for instance. It’s not congruent with their values. (Something I blogged about this idea a year ago, in fact.) I hope we and other activists can eventually change those values–a very hard thing to do and a whole other discussion.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, Uncategorized

They say the definition of insanity is doing th same thing over and over and expecting different results–like Pelosi and Reid crawling back to Bush with a toothless, no-timeline funding bill on the iraq debacle. Not that the first bill was so great but it least it squeaked out an attempt to take back some of the power the Executive Branch has stolen.

The bill passed in Congress yesterday is simply inexcusable.

I sent this letter to Harry Reid and (slightly modified to reflect and thank her for her personal “no” vote on the appropriation) Nancy Pelosi today:

Funding the war once again without strings is a terrible mistake. I cannot believe you caved in to Bush again! Where is the leadership? If Bush insisted on vetoing the time line, there is no need to have brought *any* bill.

When the Democratic Party calls asking for money, I will *not* be opening my wallet!

In fact, if you were looking for a path to create massive defections to the Green party or some other actual alternative, this is it.

I think Dennis Kucinich has the right idea: if bush vetoes a funding bill with restrictions, you simply don’t give him a bill. Or better yet, you increase the restrictions. Kucinich’s own HR 1234 calls for funding only a withdrawal. A good idea, IMHO.

Use these links to send your own messages:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Events, Peace and War, Uncategorized

I don’t shock easily–but I am deeply shocked. I m outraged. I’m enraged. I’m bloody furious!

We hear all the time from the Bill O’Reillys, Ann Coulters and Rush Limbaughs of the country that any criticism of the Iraq “mission” is unpatriotic and goes against supporting our troops.

And then this–The Nation reports on numerous cases of soldiers injured in the war, pressured to accept a psychiatric discharge for a “pre-existing condition” that they never had, being told by their military doctors that this way they’ll get to keep their benefits and get a much quicker discharge–when in actuality these brave young men and women are hung out to dry, stripped of their medical benefits, and left holding the bill for any enlistment bonus they haven’t yet earned out.

This lowest of lowball tactics is saving the Veterans Administration millions of dollars–and is yet another betrayal of these many-times-betrayed soldiers.

Here’s a longish quote from the article:

He was standing in the doorway of his battalion’s headquarters when a
107-millimeter rocket struck two feet above his head. The impact punched a piano-sized hole in the concrete facade, sparked a huge fireball and tossed the 25-year-old Army specialist to the floor, where he lay blacked out among the rubble.

“The next thing I remember is waking up on the ground.” Men from his unit had gathered around his body and were screaming his name. “They started shaking me. But I was numb all over,” he says. “And it’s weird because… because for a few minutes you feel like you’re not really there. I could see them, but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything. I started shaking because I thought I was dead.”

Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from Town’s neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September
2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready.

But instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town’s wounds were actually caused by a “personality disorder.” Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.

Town is not alone. A six-month investigation has uncovered multiple cases in which soldiers wounded in Iraq are suspiciously diagnosed as having a personality disorder, then prevented from collecting benefits.

If it weren’t already obvious, this “treatment”–which ought to be the subject of immediate Congressional investigation AND ACTION is the very opposite of supporting the troops. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–the best support we can give our troops is to bring them home safely and SOON. To which I’ll add that bringing charges against the barbarians carrying out this deeply inhumane and vicious policy that victimizes the very people hurt in carrying out their orders is also a way of supporting the troops.

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