News of the Month

May 8, 2004

And the war drags on. Words spring to mind – quagmire … Vietnam … war dead … coffins. When will they ever learn?

Speaking of death, the Statesman had a pair of editorials back on April 23. The first was entitled “The cost of the war in taxpayer dollars” and the second was entitled “… and in human lives.” But when you read the second one, it’s obvious that the Statesman’s editorial staff only considers American lives to be “human lives.” It talks about the nearly 600 Americans who have been killed in our latest colonial war; but there’s no mention at all in there of the 9 to 10 thousand Iraqis – most of them innocent civilians – that our forces have killed in this century’s first exercise in American adventurism.

The message comes across, loud and clear – our bosses, and their media flacks, don’t consider “the enemy” to be human. Of course, that’s all too common. In World War I, the Germans were transformed into “the beastly Hun” by the American yellow press; in Vietnam, they were “gooks.” Anything to convince our young people who’ve been forced to go to war for your right to drive an SUV that it’s OK to kill “them.” “They’re less than human, after all.” How bad is it? Later in the show I’ll read some on-the-scene reports from Fallujah that show what’s really going on there – the war crimes our forces have committed, over and over again, against the civilians of that devastated city.

You’ve heard, I’m sure, of the degradation and torture of Iraqi freedom fighters by British and US soldiers. We’ve seen the pictures, and they’re not pretty – they’re downright disgusting, to be honest. The real question is, though, “Were the US soldiers who committed these atrocities acting totally on their own, or is there something systemic that allows – even encourages – this kind of barbarism? An article from the Washington Post, reprinted in Sunday’s Statesman, said:

“The Army Reserve commander who oversaw the (Abu Ghraib) prison said Saturday that military intelligence, rather than the military police, dictated the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. ‘The prison, and that particular cellblock where the events took place, were under the control of the MI command,’ Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski said in a telephone interview Saturday night from her home in Hilton Head, S.C.

“Karpinski described a high-pressure atmosphere that prized successful interrogations. A month before the alleged abuses occurred, she said, a team of military intelligence officers from the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility came to Abu Ghraib. ‘Their main and specific mission was to get the interrogators – give them new techniques to get more information from detainees,’ she said. …

A related article in The New Yorker magazine’s issue dated May 10 says:

“A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of ‘sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’ at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

“ ‘Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.’

“There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added – ‘detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.’ Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their ‘extremely sensitive nature.’ ”

But we can’t let all the torture and death stop the profit machine from rolling along. In another article from Sunday’s Statesman, Matt Kelley of the AP says:

“Ten companies, with billions of dollars in U.S. contracts for Iraq reconstruction, have paid more than $300 million in penalties since 2000 to resolve allegations of bid rigging, fraud, delivery of faulty military parts and environmental damage.

“The United States is paying more than $780 million to one British firm that was convicted of fraud on three federal construction projects and banned from U.S. government work during 2002, according to a review of government documents. A Virginia company convicted of rigging bids for American-funded projects in Egypt also has been awarded Iraq contracts worth hundreds of millions. And a third firm found guilty of environmental violations and bid rigging won U.S. Army approval for a subcontract to clean up an Iraqi harbor.

“ ‘We have not made firms pay the price when they screw up,’ said Peter Singer, a former Pentagon official who worked on a task force overseeing military and contract work in the Balkans. ‘But it’s not the company’s fault if it has a dumb client. I’m not blaming the companies; I’m blaming the government,’ said Singer, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. The contracts are legal because the Bush administration repealed regulations put in place by the Clinton administration that would have allowed officials to bar new government work for companies convicted or penalized during the previous three years.”

Our glorious leaders, in other words, took active steps to permit corporate felons – convicted felons – to continue to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in war profits. You know, I’m old enough to remember the years after World War II; in those days, “war profiteer” was one of the worst insults that you could slap on a person, or a company. Nowadays, it’s synonymous with “Bush campaign donor.” Did I say that? You bet I did – what do you think happened behind the closed doors of the White House to “encourage” W to repeal those regulation?

Of course, you know that King George and Cardinal Richelieu – uh, Vice President Cheney – appeared together before the 9/11 Committee late last month. We don’t know what they said, exactly, because they wouldn’t allow anybody to record their words … hmmm; wonder what they were so afraid of. Mark Russell, a satirist who appears on PBS occasionally, said that of course they appeared together, for the same reason Charlie McCarthy always appeared with Edgar Bergen. (And if you don’t get that one, ask someone older.)

Here’s an interesting tidbit from columnist and self-described whistle-blower Al Martin, dated May 1. Mr. Martin is a former Navy officer who worked as a black ops specialist in the Office of Naval Intelligence, and who was briefed into the CIA’s part of the Iran Contra fiasco, which was named “Operation Black Eagle” (which is where he “blew the whistle”). Mr. Martin says:

“Interestingly enough, and I’m not the only one who has noticed this, the Bush re-election campaign, being run by Karen Hughes, has not only pulled out of 18 states, but they have now begun to close down offices in some of the large states – like Florida, California and New York, where they’d really want to make an effort to concentrate.

“There again, it begs the question: they are increasingly acting as if they don’t even care. It’s increasingly obvious that they’re not even bothering to mount a real campaign and that their only real agenda at this point seems to be to insure that the sunset provisions of the Patriot I Act are removed, to give the President authority to cancel or postpone elections by edict. I think that’s what they’re really concerned about. Secondly, they’re concerned that the Democrats don’t foster any vote to reduce, at least for now, the big, multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts for the Republican rich.

“And that, at this point, seems to be their only agenda. They're not campaigning. They have not instructed their individual-state campaign managers. In 34 of the 50 states, they haven’t even bothered to print any political paraphernalia – posters, handbills, pens, and bumper stickers. What does that tell you?”

Take that for what you will.

OK, I’ve talked about the Bush junta for a while; let’s turn our attention to the other privileged son of wealth, Yale graduate, and Skull and Bones member in the race, John Kerry. To start off, here’s a list of the houses he owns:

· A mansion in Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania – assessed value $3.7 million (picture)

· A ski getaway/vacation home in Ketchum, Idaho – assessed value $4.9 million (picture)

· A brownstone in Georgetown (Washington, DC) – assessed value: $4.7 million (picture)

· A waterfront retreat on Brant Point, Nantucket – assessed value: $9.2 million (picture)

· A 4-story brick “home” on Beacon Hill in Boston – assessed value: $6.9 million (picture)

Total assessed values – $239.4 million. Oh – one other thing: he sold his 3-story $7.8 million estate in Italy (picture) to George Clooney right before he announced his candidacy for president. We don’t know what other foreign property he might own, because he has repeatedly denied requests for that information.

Here’s some more information on John Kerry, from Howie Carr, a Boston Herald columnist. It’s his report of the time he appeared on a radio talk show in Boston, John Kerry’s home ground, and asked his listeners to tell them their Kerry stories.

“The tales often have one other common thread. Most end with Sen. Kerry inquiring of the lesser mortal: ‘Do you know who I am?’ … His first wife came from a Philadelphia Main Line family worth $300 million. His second wife is a pickle-and-ketchup heiress. Kerry lives in a mansion on Beacon Hill on which he has borrowed $6 million to finance his campaign. A fire hydrant that prevented him and his wife from parking their SUV in front of their tony digs was removed by the city of Boston at his behest.

“… in 1993 he was between his first and second heiresses – a time he now calls ‘the wandering years,’ although an equally apt description might be ‘the freeloading years.’ For some of the time, he was, for all practical purposes, homeless. His friends allowed him into a real-estate deal in which he flipped a condo for quick resale, netting a $21,000 profit on a cash investment of exactly nothing. For months he rode around in a new car supplied by a shady local Buick dealer. When the dealer's ties to a congressman who was later indicted for racketeering were exposed, Kerry quickly explained that the non-payment was a mere oversight, and wrote out a check.

“In the Senate, his record of his constituent services has been lackluster, and most of his colleagues, despite their public support, are hard-pressed to list an accomplishment. Just last fall, a Boston TV reporter ambushed three congressmen with the question, name something John Kerry has accomplished in Congress. After a few nervous giggles, two could thin of nothing, and a third mentioned a baseball field, and then misidentified Kerry as ‘Sen. Kennedy.’ ”

Does a coherent picture begin to gel, friends? Are we beginning to see that John Kerry is just as much a rich, spoiled brat as our current Commander-in-Thief is? That he’s just as much a puppet of the real powers in this country as George Bush? That, in fact, there’s almost no difference between the two Skull-and-Bonesmen? Oh, granted, Kerry has medals from Vietnam where Bush just has a yellow stripe down his back, and Kerry’s at least said that our air and water are important to him, where W can’t even spell “environment;” but really – what’s the difference? As I’ve said before, there’s no more difference between the two wings of the Republocrat Party than there is between the National Football Conference and the American Football Conference.

If you want a real choice this November, then sign the Libertarian petition for ballot access – and while you’re at it, sign the Greens’ petition, and even the Nader petition. The more choices we have, the better. (The deadline is May 24, so get out there and do it.) Kerry vs. Bush isn’t a real choice; it’s one of those “bogus choices” I’ve talked about before – a choice between two nearly identical things, paraded before us to divert our attention from the true alternatives, the ones that can make a true difference in this country. Where do you find the Libertarian petition? Well, to start with, look for us at any of the big public events around town – Eeyore’s Birthday Party, the concerts at Auditorium Shores, etc. If you can’t get to one of those, Wes Benedict is the Volunteer Coordinator for our petition drive; he can be reached at 442-4910, or on his cell phone at 659-8896, and he’d be glad to talk you. Maybe you’re even fed up enough with politics as usual, with nothing but bogus choices everywhere you look, to help us – we’d love to have you. Wes can tell you how to do that, too.

Finally, let me leave you with a bit of wisdom from the comic strip “Boondocks”. This particular comic appeared on March 28. (I have removed the actual image of the comic for copyright reasons, but the text reads "What's problematic to me is not that the President is staggeringly dim-witted, but that the press knows he's staggeringly dim-witted and everyone just pretends that he's not. It's like the Presidency has become the Special Oympics and everyone wants to give him an award just for trying.")