Author: Eric Garris

I have been skeptical about the likelihood of a military draft in the near future, but I am starting to think it is inevitable.

In the Washington Monthly, Phillip Carter and Paul Glastris give a very persuasive case for the draft, given a commitment to an increasingly-interventionist foreign policy, which they possess. They explain clearly why the alternatives like “Stop-Loss” and “Military Transformation” will not adequately feed the military for a growing US empire.

Of course, Carter and Glastris are not content with the social engineering that can be accomplished by a conscription-fed army can accomplish globally:

A 21st-century draft like this would create a cascading series of benefits for society. It would instill a new ethic of service in that sector of society, the college-bound, most likely to reap the fruits of American prosperity. It would mobilize an army of young people for vital domestic missions, such as helping a growing population of seniors who want to avoid nursing homes but need help with simple daily tasks like grocery shopping. It would give more of America’s elite an experience of the military. Above all, it would provide the all-important surge capacity now missing from our force structure, insuring that the military would never again lack for manpower. And it would do all this without requiring any American to carry a gun who did not choose to do so.

We need to pay close attention to these arguments, but hope that US political and military leaders don’t.

Many people wrote me about my post yesterday ("Stephen Schwartz, Web Moron") thinking that Mr. Schwartz must have been joking when he demanded we stop linking to his photograph.

I assure you, Stephen Schwartz was not joking. I am including excerpts from the 15 emails he sent me yesterday. Mr. Schwartz went on about a number of subjects (mostly about his mother and how much more important he is than Justin Raimondo) but I am only quoting the sections (and my responses) having to do with our right to link to a publicly-available web page.

Stephen Schwartz: You have no right to misuse a copyrighted photo of me. Remove it from your links forthwith.

Eric Garris: You have no right to use the copyrighted photo of Justin Raimondo you ran on your article. Are you only able to accuse people of things that you are guilty of yourself? It certainly appears that way.

SS: I had nothing to do with the illustration of Dennis Raimondo included on FPM. I am not an officer, editor, board member, or otherwise involved with FPM except as an unpaid contributor. You and Dennis, on the other hand, have full responsibility for what appears on your site. Are you really so stupid as not even to understand this, while dispensing advice on how to use hyperlinks and so forth? If you had a problem with the use of the photo, you should have directed it to Horowitz and FPM, not me. It was a photo taken from your website. I was not consulted about it. The photograph of me is copyrighted and is not used on websites. It is used only by my publisher — a serious mainstream publisher called Random House. It is not your property to misuse, notwithstanding your alleged devotion to property rights. Remove it immediately.

EG: There is no copyright violation, we have not posted it, we are just linking to it. As I explained to your lawyer two years ago, there is no copyright infringement by linking. It IS public because it IS on a Website available to link to. We are just pointing to it.

SS: It is a copyrighted photo, stupid. You cannot use it without permission. It is only on publicity connected with the book and authorized by Random House. I’m copying all of this to them. You need to hire a lawyer. There is copyright involved in linking.

EG: We have not used it, we merely pointed to the Website that anyone on the Internet can look at it. Only an idiot would not understand the difference.

SS: Look at the picture, stupid. It has a world copyright mark on it. THE ATLANTIC used it with permission of the photographer. You cannot derive permission from that use. Invest in a dictionary, or look up copyright on the net, if you can’t afford a call to a lawyer.

EG: We are not using it, we are linking to it. The courts have said that linking is the same as citing something. I don’t need a lawyer, I have consulted with yours.

SS: Western Policy and TCS have my permission to use my picture. You do not. But the matter will be handled.

EG: We did not use the picture. Do you really believe that citations are the same as publishing something?

SS: Your Goebbels-esque attempt to twist language would be funny if it were not so lame. Yeah, I’m not in the game, but I appear on TV and my books are published by mainstream publishers, not as self-published pamphlets. Gosh, you’ve hurt me so bad. This is over. You’ve done me plenty of favors with this; I shouldn’t have complained.

SS (next day, after no further response from me): Playing slippery amateur dialectics with me doesn’t work. The use of the photo without permission is just one issue. Your collective statements, since you are responsible for Dennis’s libels as much as he is, about my marital status and religious status at birth are also at issue. They were made without any knowledge on your part and demonstrate the general pattern of reckless defamation pursued by your little clique of increasingly ignored nobodies. This isn’t a matter of changing the subject. It’s the same subject. You are deliberate liars, fabricators, and publishers of libels.

In response to Justin Raimondo’s article today, Stephen Schwartz has written a letter, from which I excerpt a key portion:

You have no right to misuse a copyrighted photo of me. Remove it from your links forthwith.

We did not run a photo of Mr. Schwartz, we merely linked to a photo on the Website of The Atlantic.

On the the other hand FrontPageMag did run a copyrighted photo of Justin on their front page accompanying the article by Mr. Schwartz attacking Mr. Raimondo.

Two years ago Mr. Schwartz threatened to sue Antiwar.com for linking to a San Francisco Examiner article which talked about his arrest for writing graffiti on a wall. The article explained that Mr. Schwartz was responding to grafitti that said “Stephen Schwartz is the Philosophical Whore of North Beach.”

Mr. Schwartz’s lawyer and I had a long conversation in which I explained to him the difference between linking to an article and actually running the article. Since his lawyer had no email address and had never been on the Web, he was grateful for the clarification. No legal action was forthcoming, of course.

Now that we are in the 21st Century, you would think that Mr. Schwartz would have learned the difference between publishing something and citing it, but some people are just slow.

For his own education, I would like to point out that Mr. Schwartz’s photos can be viewed here, here, and here.

The Hollywood Liberal videotaped Justin Raimondo’s talk to the Whittier Law School on Tuesday (which his Wednesday column is a transcript of). The talk is available in four parts, in both high- and low-bandwidth.

• Part 1 High-Speed
• Part 1 Dial-Up
• Part 2 High-Speed
• Part 2 Dial-Up
• Part 3 High-Speed
• Part 3 Dial-Up
• Part 4 High-Speed
• Part 4 Dial-Up

Many thanks for THL.

Our friends at the Stop the War Coalition in Britain asked me to post this appeal:

The British antiwar movement, the Stop the War Coalition is holding a national demonstration on Saturday 19 March 2005, in London, as part of the international day of protest action on the second anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq.

The London demo’s themes are: ‘Bring the Troops Home’, ‘End the Occupation of Iraq’,’No more Bush Wars’.

The coalition is ‘broke’. It has spent every last pound on the event – but wanted to fly out a key speaker from the USA – former UN Arms Inspector Scott Ritter. Ritter is warning of US plans for the invasion of Iran, which he believes could be in June 2005.

The UK protest will be a focus for world media, after the success of the Feb 2003 London anti-war demonstration which mobilised around 2 million people in London in the greatest protest in British history. This protest includes speakers from Military Families Against the War.

UK Stop the War Coalition can find some expenses but not the key travel costs such as airfare. Want to help?

We have two days to raise the airfare. If you donate and the total raised is not enough, the Stop the War Coalition will invite Ritter to a UK speaking tour this spring, and any funds raised from US supporters will be used to make that happen.

Get Ritter to London and the world’s media!

One-off donations to UK Stop the War Coalition
(NB the donations are listed in UK pounds. £1 = approx $1.83).

Here is a report from Michele Naar-Obed, who recently returned from Iraq with a Christian Peacemaker Team:

I have recently returned from a two week fact finding delegation in Iraq with the Christian Peacemaker Teams. CPT has maintained a continuous presence in Iraq since October 2002. The main office is located in Chicago IL (www.cpt.org).

Our delegation consisted of 6 US citizens and 1 citizen of the UK. Half of our delegation, of which I was a part, was based in a residential neighborhood in Baghdad. The other half stayed in Kerbala. Although it was quite difficult and dangerous to move around Baghdad, our group was able to meet with quite a few Iraqis as we tried to get a broad understanding of events and life in Iraq.

The topic of most concern during our stay was the November 2004 invasion of Fallujah. We interviewed a young Iraqi man who was in Fallujah City during the Nov. invasion, survived and was then taken into US custody for over 2 months. He was finally released after it was determined he was not part of the “insurgency”.

He reported seeing numerous examples of human rights abuses starting with the fact that men between the ages of 16 and 50 were not allowed to leave Fallujah when residents were told to evacuate. He told us about execution style killing of civilians by US soldiers, killing of women and children carrying white flags, and dead bodies with massive burns and unusual injuries indicating the use of white phosphorus (napalm) and other chemical weapons.

Similar reports on Fallujah were given by 2 Iraqi Human Rights workers, and a representative of the Muslim Scholars Board who had received information directly from Fallujan citizens during the invasion. We were told that the Muslim Scholars Board representitives tried to hold press conferences during that time but were silenced and sometimes slandered.

We were also told that about 75% of the city’s infrastructure was destroyed. At present, there is no piped water available and the water that is being brought in by government sources is inadequatly chlorinated. There are no functioning hospitals and the closest medical aid station is outside the city limits. In order to leave and re-enter the city, residents go through numerous check points which can take up to 6 hours. There is a military base in the city of Fallujah and Iraqis are often intimidated and humiliated by the soldiers. There is pretty much across the board hatred for Americans at this time.

Additionally, we spoke with 2 UN representatives who confirmed all of these reports. One representative told us that they have spent weeks negotiating with the multinational forces to get access into Fallujah to begin investigation and documentation but have so far been denied.

Without a full investigation, abuses such as these are likely to continue and spread. In fact, while we were collecting information on Fallujah, we learned that “Operation River Blitz” was going on in the city of Ramadi and its surrounding villages along the Euphrates River. At present, there has been a media black out on this operation, but the UN representative told us that “spin off” was beginning to occur. Residents of this area have begun to flee and talk about what is happening..

Our soldiers are paying a hefty price. The ones who make it back are coming home severely damaged from carrying out orders they believe are immoral and in some cases, illegal. As one Marine who was in Fallujah summed it “you have to be psycho to kill like we do”. Many who refuse to follow orders or try to escape are hunted down and treated like criminals when the real criminals are the ones in the Pentagon who create these policies.

On the positive side, we met representatives from grassroots Iraqi based organizations who believe in the power of nonviolence. Some of them were involved in serious negotiations with the multinational forces that led to the diversion of further violence. It seems there are many from all sides of this conflict, ours included, who are quite skilled in diplomacy as we learned that negotiation and diplomatic solutions have been employed behind closed doors routinely. We met with the fledgling Muslim Peacemaker Teams and Women’s Will, both rooted in the teachings of nonviolence.The UN, whose work of diplomacy and nation building is often overlooked and underestimated, is slowly regaining the trust of the Iraqi people. They are steadily persevering on a course they hope will soon disentangle Iraq from foreign occupation.

The war and daily violence is taking its toll on everyone. For ten days I learned what it was like to worry that the vehicle I was in could be blown up. I stiffened when our driver got near a military convoy. Soldiers have been known to shoot at cars that get too close. The possibility of kidnapping was real and it changed to way we related to people causing even more stress on the fragile bonds of human friendship. The longer this cycle of violence continues, the more fear, distrust and despair will deepen.

This administration has put in a request for another $81 billion to fund the war. I’d like to propose we use that money to train our young people in diplomacy and negotiation and utilize nonviolent means to solving conflict. Worldwide democracy and freedom may actually have a chance despite Mr. Bush’s policies.

This is Michele Naar-Obed ‘s third trip to Iraq since December 2002. She is a member of the Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker in Duluth, MN and has been involved in the peace movement for over 13 years. She has participated in numerous acts of nonviolent resistance to militarism including 2 “plowshare actions” resulting in over 3 years of incarceration.