Posted on 25-6-2003
Mid-East
Road Crash
INTRODUCTION: WHERE DOES THE ROAD
MAP LEAD?
In July, 2000 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak broke off
talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat at the
Camp David summit hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton. That
September, Ariel Sharon, chairman of the Likud party, made a
provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Control over this holy site for both Muslims and Jews is contested
by Palestinians and Israelis. The visit implied Israeli sovereignty
over all Jerusalem, the eastern portion of which is considered
occupied territory by the international community. So began
the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising.
As in the first intifada in the late 1980s, the demand is for
an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip,
and East Jerusalem -- which has persisted since 1967 -- and
acknowledgment of the Palestinian refugees right to return to
the villages from which they were forced to leave during the
1948 war that established the State of Israel. In the 33 months
since, human death has saturated the region: 816
Israelis and 2,384
Palestinians have been killed.
Early in his presidency, George W. Bush avoided substantial
involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict. After September
11, 2001 a number of factors -- escalating violence in the area
and Israel's attempt to link September 11th with Palestinian
suicide bombings, pressure from the Israel lobby and the Christian
Right, and the desire for an increasing U.S. influence in the
oil-rich Middle East -- prompted Bush to take an active, personal
role in promoting an agreement.
That proposed agreement is the Road Map. While the initiative
has been praised for calling for an end to violence and for
endorsing the formation a Palestinian state, the Road Map provides
no mechanism for actually ending the violence, leaves uncertain
the borders of the proposed state, and postpones determining
the status of the 380,000
Israeli settlers and four
million Palestinian refugees. With matters so central to
the resolution of the conflict left to be decided at a future
date or ignored entirely, the Road Map is still far from being
a bona fide peace proposal.
True and lasting peace begins with justice for all the people
of the region. That the Road Map will lead in that direction
is not at all evident.
GRASSROOTS INTERVIEW: DANIEL ELLSBERG
The following are the personal responses of Daniel Ellsberg
to the top-ranked questions MoveOn.org members posed last week:
First, let me say that the messages accompanying the questions
below, and many of the others, are eloquent, impassioned, and
very well-informed despite perplexities that I fully share.
I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to read them. To be
reminded that there are American citizens so thoughtful and
so concerned both to understand and to alleviate our condition
has the same effect for me of witnessing and taking part in
the large demonstrations and actions of civil disobedience during
the first stage of the ongoing war in Iraq. It sustains my hope
that we have a chance to avert the disasters this administration
is heading for at home and abroad.
As those demonstrations did for me, and I'm sure for other participants,
these letters remind me that although those of us who actively
oppose this war of aggression and occupation -- and the ominous
abridgements of the Bill of Rights that are accompanying it
-- are only a small proportion of the American public: We are
America, too, and there are a lot of us.
Are we "only" 5%, 10%, of the population? Isn't that
five to ten million adults? One percent? A million. More than
that were in demonstrations, in this country alone: as part
of a far larger global movement, the largest worldwide protest
ever seen before or during any war! That's enough activists
to move and change any country in the world, even (with courage)
a police state. And we're far from that, yet. We can avert that
real danger if we continue using to the fullest all the freedoms
we still have.
On to the questions:
1. Should a special prosecutor investigate charges of racketeering
by members of the Bush administration who personally profited
from the war on Iraq?
-- Gerald Kleiner, Middletown, New York, USA
I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a defendant -- so I consulted movement
lawyers, one of whom helped me look up the RICO Act: http://caselaw.1p.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/18/parts/i/chapters/96/toc.html.
Another lawyer who is familiar with that act confirmed my layman's
sense, as I read it, that it would be quite a stretch, legally,
to apply that particular statute to the war-profiteering of
this administration's favorite firms. If you happen on an adventurous
prosecutor who wants to take it on, good luck! But it doesn't
really look like a promising approach.
Your mention of racketeering in this context, though, sent me
onto the web to recapture a staggering quotation by the Marine
hero Major General Smedley Butler, summing up his thirty-years
of service largely in U.S. colonial wars from Nicaragua and
Cuba to China: "During that time I spent most of my time
being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street
and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster
for capitalism...The best (Al Capone) could do was to operate
his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
Look up the whole quote, which would have been an eye-opener
for me if I had read it when I was in the Marines: www.fas.org/man/smedley.htm.
Butler doesn't mention there that in colonial operations in
Mexico (Vera Cruz) and Haiti he was awarded two Congressional
Medals of Honor. How many medals will be won, some posthumously,
by pre-enlightened American officers and troops in Iraq and
elsewhere, now that we've extended our protect ion rackets from
the Caribbean to the Persian Gulf?
My lawyer friend points out that it will be hard to find that
businessmen broke any laws in their current profiteering, since
it was effectively businessmen who wrote the laws. The secret,
no-bid contracts awarded to Cheney's Halliburton and George
Shultz's Bechtel (and WorldCom! As Molly Ivins exposes in her
column Friday on the Iraq Gold Rush) certainly deserve congressional
examination. Fat chance. But take the effort to thank journalists
like Ivins and Arianna Huffington who bring sunlight onto these
scavengers and use their information in letters to the editor
and call-in shows, to reopen the discussion of corporate scandals
and influence that was interrupted, not by coincidence, by war
on Iraq.
2. Why can't Bush and Cheney be impeached?
-- Susan Petry, Durham, North Carolina, USA
The familiar metaphor seems painfully apt here. As the world
can see, Uncle Sam is holding a smoking gun, above a stricken
nation in the Middle East; and despite his claim of self-defense
-- the need to beat an aggressor to the draw -- no weapons of
mass destruction are to be found on the victim.
Thanks to an unprecedented flood of leaks from the intelligence
community, it is increasingly clear that whatever the personal
beliefs of the officials claiming to "know," to be
"absolutely convinced" that Saddam Hussein "possessed
weapons" that were an intolerable threat to us and his
neighbors -- from Bush and Powell and Rumsfeld to Wolowitz--their
statements about the secret evidential basis for these confident
assertions were wildly misleading. Those assurances -- which
were critical to justifying, on grounds of "necessity,"
a "preemptive" war that would otherwise appear blatantly
criminal--look like lies. (See an excellent discussion in this
week's New Republic, by John Judis and Spencer Ackerman: "The
Selling of the War: The First Casualty." http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030630&s=ackermanjudis063003)
Exactly so, their claims of "bullet-proof" evidence
of significant links of Iraq to 9-11. If so, we were lied into
war. Tens of thousands of Iraqis -- including more innocent
civilians than were murdered (not by Saddam Hussein) on 9-11
-- were lied to death, along with American KIA in numbers that
are increasing week by week (and will continue to increase,
I believe, every week that George W. Bush and Richard Cheney
remain in office).
That's a serious charge. But I'm prepared to believe it on the
basis of my own experience, not only in Vietnam -- which is
looking painfully relevant to our prospects in the occupation
of Iraq -- but in Washington under Robert McNamara and President
Lyndon Johnson. I watched -- and, I'm sorry to say, kept my
mouth shut outside the Pentagon -- as they lied Congress into
a delegation of war powers by claiming certainty about an unprovoked
attack on our warships (See http://www.ellsberg.net/sample.htm).
I knew at the time that the evidence for that attack was highly
ambiguous: just like, it appears, evidence before the war that
Saddam still possessed and had deployed WMD's. In fact, there
had been no attack at all, but Congress scarcely suspected that
for years: I didn't tell them, nor did anyone else in the Executive
branch who had reached that conclusion. Suspicions of the total
absence of WMD's have emerged, this time, within m onths of
the exaggerated claims.
Was that manipulation in 1964 an impeachable offense? I would
say flatly yes: of the most serious kind. Likewise if President
Bush and his vice president and cabinet officers (all, by the
way, subject to impeachment) are guilty of the same misrepresentation
of the secret intelligence available to them in their justification
for a war unauthorized by the UN Charter and Security Council.
I personally suspect that's true. That doesn't mean that I see
any prospect whatever that this Republican Congress (or the
majority of these Democrats!) would actually impeach or convict
this President for this war, no matter what evidence is produced.
Yet I think it's important for our democracy, and our security,
to argue forcefully right now that lying us into war -- as has
happened before -- was and would be now a high crime, an impeachable
offense.
So far our evidence that this has happened is almost entirely
from leaks (as was true in 1971, with the Pentagon Papers).
Not enough has been disclosed yet to call credibly for impeachment,
which amounts to indictment. To raise the issue of Executive
accountability, yes. To investigate, certainly.
The current MoveOn petition drive has it exactly right: only
citizen pressure on Congress to establish an independent bipartisan
commission will provide a basis for Executive accountability.
The currently-planned "review" in secret sessions
of the Senate Intelligence Committee (the Republican chairman
will not even let it be called an "investigation"!),
confined to the performance of the intelligence agencies, will
not do that job. Republicans, under White House pressure, will
resist our calls for an independent commission, or even for
open hearings in other relevant committees. But our own citizens'
pressure, which should start now (good ad last week, MoveOn!)
to investigate how we got into this quagmire and whether there
was official betrayal of the public trust will get harder to
resist as weeks and months go by of continued bloodletting and
growing opposition in Iraq to our occupation.
3. What do we, as a nation, have to do to stop this type
of abuse of power, corruption, conflict of interest, lying,
cheating, powermongering, and fraudulent behavior?
-- N. Webster, Pasadena, California, USA
The founders of our nation, the drafters of our Constitution
and Bill of Rights, had better answers to these age-old problems
of Executive abuse of power than the world had ever seen before,
and better than we've been taught to accept in the last sixty
years of Cold War and hot wars. Their distrust of mortals in
power, their insights on the need for checks and balances, separation
of powers, impeachment, constitutional guarantees of citizens'
rights as against legislative or executive authority, have been
steadily obscured and repressed on spurious grounds of national
security. The effect has been to make the president just what
the founders meant to prevent: an elected monarch. Or, as it
turns out this year, a nearly-elected emperor.
If monarchy is corrupting -- and it is -- wait till you see
what overt empire does to us. It's time to read Tom Paine again
(another good website, as it happens) and wake up from our dreams
of kingship and lording it over others, to reconstruct a republic.
The Constitution, as written and amended, really deserves our
loyalty and our defense of it, against all enemies foreign and
domestic: and this administration has within it more domestic
enemies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights than any we've
seen before. They've got to go; but that's just a start, for
our recovery from an addiction to arms-building and (till just
now, covert) empire.
Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse
their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives
exclusively to the Congress. (See Abraham Lincoln -- before
he became president himself -- writing from Congress in 1848:
"The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making
power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following
reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their
people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the
good of the people was the object. This our convention understood
to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they
resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should
hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us." http://www.watchpost.org/lincoln.htm).
Except for 123 House members and 23 Senators, members of Congress,
Republican and Democratic (including several presidential candidates)
covered themselves with shame by giving the president, with
no hearings and scant deliberation or debate, an undated, unconstitutional,
declaration of war. This was some improvement over 1964 -- when
only two Senators voted against the equivalent Tonkin Gulf Resolution
-- and considerably better than their own performance one year
earlier in September, 2001, when exactly one lawmaker, Barbara
Lee of Oakland, had the conscience and courage to vote against
giving the president, without prior hearings or debate, almost-unlimited
power to go to war (in Afghanistan, or wherever he might claim
a link to 9-11: Rumsfeld, we now know, wanted invade Iraq right
away, but was put off). But in 2001 and 2002 the majority didn't
even have the excuse that the president had lied to them, like
Lyndon Johnson in 1964, about his intent to cash this blank
check for war. (Bush appears to have lied only about his reasons).
The Vietnam quagmire got Congress to enact (over Nixon's veto)
the War Powers Act, which remained an abdication of the constitutional
responsibilities of Congress and which subsequently elected
kings all ignored. With the Iraq fiasco (as I believe it will
soon appear) let's educate our fellow citizens to demand a return
to the Constitution.
4. How can the people take a stance against unjust wars when
the media and Congress play a complicit role in either keeping
the truth from the public or refusing to question supposed "evidence"
without demanding proof?
-- April Cartright, Lake Worth, Florida, USA
Why did not one of Barbara Lee's Congressional colleagues --
many of whom had districts as safe as hers -- join her in voting
against an unconstitutional delegation of their war powers,
without deliberation? Many of them, she told me, had assured
her they would vote with her up till the moment of the vote;
she was startled to find herself alone. Her guess was that they
were afraid, at the moment of truth, to be accused, however
unjustly, of lack of patriotism, of disloyalty to the president,
even of treason. (She got all those charges. They were nearly
all from outside her own district. But those words aren't easy
for any American, or anyone, to hear: as I can testify). But
she did what she knew was right. And courage is contagious.
A year later, against the next Tonkin Gulf-like Resolution for
Iraq, she and Dennis Kucinich organized 123 votes in favor of
the Constitution.
Lincoln's comment above related to what he saw as President
Polk's illegal and deceptive provocation of war with Mexico,
which he opposed as a Congressman. His later Commander of the
Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant, saw that war the same way, when
he participated in it as a second lieutenant. In his memoirs
he described that war as "one of the most unjust ever waged
by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of
a republic following the bad example of European monarchies,
in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional
territory."
He describes the process of getting into a war of aggression
against Mexico in terms very familiar to me from our "reprisal"
against the supposed Tonkin Gulf attack and later "retaliation"
for attacks at Pleiku and Qui Nhon, and their effects on Congressional
opposition. "We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was
essential that Mexico should commence it. It was very doubtful
whether Congress would declare war; but if Mexico should attack
our troops, the executive could announce, ÔWhereas, war exists
by the acts of, etc.," and prosecute the contest with vigor.
Once initiated there were but few public men who would have
the courage to oppose it. Experience proves that the man who
obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether
right or wrong, occupied no enviable place in life or history.
Better for him, individually, to advocate Ôwar, pestilence,
and famine,' than to act as obstructionist to a war already
begun."
Lincoln, nicknamed "Spotty" at the time for his Spot
Resolutions against the Mexican war, was denouncd as "unpatriotic"
by his own Whig party in his home district in Illinois, to which
he was returned after one two-year term in the House. Grant
served in the war he opposed, but he looked back later on a
heavy national price: "The Southern rebellion was largely
the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals,
are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment
in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times."
(http://home.nycap.rr.com/history/grant1.html#Ch-4)
A quote on the subject by Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy in
the Nazi regime, interviewed by a psychologist during his trial
at Nuremburg in 1943, has been going around the Internet over
the last six months, but usually in a truncated form that leaves
out its direct reference to U.S. democracy. Here's the whole
quote, from G. M. Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary (N.Y. 1947, pp.
278-279), Gilbert being the psychologist, an American intelligence
office who spoke German:
We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary
to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are
very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering
shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk
his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is
to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common
people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor
in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine
the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people
along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or
a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In
a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their
elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress
can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice,
the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any
country." At this moment, many of us firmly believe, it
is the policies of our president and his advisors, not our own
skepticism and protest, that are exposing this country to increased
danger: danger of initiating unnecessary, illegal and stalemated
or escalating wars; danger of vengeful terrorist attacks (exploiting
U.S. vulnerabilities he has neglected to mend and a flow of
recruits his wars will swell); and increased danger of nuclear
proliferation, eventually to such terrorist groups.
There is a personal and national price to be paid by silence
and passive obedience, in the face of such folly, that is greater
than the pain of being called names, greater even than the loss
of a job or career. It is the price of participating in and
failing to expose and resist national disasters, unnecessary
and wrongful wars. That was the price -- of accepting a definition
of patriotism as unquestioning support of national Executive
leadership -- paid in Hitler's Germany, Emperor Hirohito's Japan
(see John Dower in this week's Nation on the myths that evoked
patriotic support for Japan's "liberation" of Manchuria,
China and Southeast Asia, and its "pre-emptive" attack
on Pearl Harbor (http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=771),
in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. invasion
of Vietnam: and now Iraq. It's up to us -- it's time for us
-- to prove Goering wrong: it doesn't have to work that way
in our country.
5. How can we best convince the public that they're being
deceived?
-- Rosemarie Pilkington, Staten Island, New York, USA
By spreading the word in every way -- in email to our friends,
letters to the editor, call-ins to talk radio, in every discussion
and argument -- that they can inform themselves on matters of
public policy far better on the Internet than on American TV,
mainstream radio (including NPR) or any individual newspaper.
The last six months of an extended book tour and political lecturing
and activism all over the country has revealed to me that the
large minority of Americans opposed to the Iraq war -- largely
Internet users, I strongly suspect-- live in an entirely different
world of information from those who actively or passively supported
the war, who rely almost entirely on presidential declarations
and sources strikingly shaped by official spin.
Daily on the websites like antiwar.com, commondreams.org, buzzflash.com,
I find a compilation of critical, relevant, informative news
stories and editorial comment from all over the country and
abroad which adds up, over time, to something closer to an adequate
understanding of current policies and events than was ever available
to any public in the past. Ironically, most of the items on
these sites do come, after all, from mainstream newspapers in
America; but the impact of access to a broad collection of probing
or critical stories on a daily basis is very different from
reading one or two such analyses or stories in a given hometown
newspaper, even a relatively good one. Moreover, through these
sites and through direct links to the British Guardian, the
Independent, the BBC and CBC (far better than American public
radio or TV), and other international news sources in English,
Americans can have access not only to other points of view but
to news and commentary that is ofte n better informed than we
can get in mainstream sources at home.
So the answer to the question (and a number of others like it)
is: We should do what we can to expand the daily readership
of these sites, and others like them, enormously. Our ability
to publicize and expand these sources of information (including
relevant history; see my references above) is the informational
and educational equivalent of the organizational tactics of
MoveOn, United for Peace, and other activist sites.
Still, it's very hard to get the majority of people in this
country, like any other, to believe that their elected leaders
are dangerously deceiving them (routine as that actually is:
a secret well-kept by insiders who want to remain or come back
as insiders). To get them to accept that -- to believe it to
the point that they will take up the burdens and risks of opposing
that leadership in committed and effective ways -- takes unusual
evidence. It takes more than news stories citing unidentified
or unofficial sources, even from those who were recently insiders.
It takes documents: large amounts of them. And in the "national
security" realm, such documents (above all, those demonstrating
deception of the public, or major errors, or possible crimes)
will be classified. Congressional hearings can get at some of
those, but only up to a point; any administration will strive,
usually successfully, to keep such documents (or testimony relating
to them) away from Congress altogether , or to postpone their
release to the public till they are no longer dramatically pertinent.
MoveOn member Andy Ayers has asked me: "Are we dependent
on another whistle-blower insider this administration"
to act as I did with the Pentagon Papers in 1971? My answer
is yes, but with a difference. I would say -- as I have been
saying since last September to every audience I've addressed,
in hopes my message may reach their friends and relatives in
the federal government -- we need someone to act as I should
have done, but did not, long before 1971, when the documents
in my safe were current.
"Don't do what I did; don't wait till the bombs are falling,"
I was saying to potential hearers in government from October
through mid-March. "If you know that your bosses and the
President are lying about their reasons for this war, or about
what they are being told about its prospects and danger and
costs, and if you possess documents that demonstrate that, I
urge you to consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964 or
1965: go to Congress and the press, with those documents, and
tell the truth."
We are hearing now important leaks, mostly anonymous, complaining
of undue administration pressure on intelligence estimates and
of misrepresentation and misuse of intelligence. It would have
been helpful to hear more of those earlier, but I'm in no position
to criticize; as my memoir spells out, it took me years of war
to reach that point or go beyond it, and when I did I no longer
had access to documents that bore on current White House decision-making.
(If I had, I would have released those instead of the history
in the Pentagon Papers).
It's possible for others in the government now to do better
than that. To kick-start a stalled process of Congressional
investigation, and the public campaign of pressure to pursue
those investigations, some with official access must take the
responsibility for releasing, without higher authorization,
hundreds or thousands of pages of documents they believe, on
their experienced judgment, to demonstrate official deception
or wrongdoing, without harming national security. I'm confident
there are men and women in this administration with access to
documents of that nature and with the personal courage and sense
of conscience and patriotism to do that, if they reflect on
that possibility and the stakes involved. It would mean risking
or sacrificing their clearances and careers, perhaps going to
prison. It could save several wars' worth of lives, and democracy
in this country.
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