Antiwar.com Blog

John McCain: “I’m a Terrorist”

Well, OK, he didn’t say that explicitly. But he did say it implicitly.

A basic logic lesson and please forgive me if you think I’m talking down to you. I’m really not. It’s just that I’m shocked at how many people, including McCain, don’t seem to get logic. If I say, “All crows are black” and I also say, “That bird is a crow,” then I’m saying that that bird is black even if I don’t say so explicitly.

On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday, April 20, John McCain called William Ayers “an unrepentant terrorist.” What was McCain’s evidence? McCain said that Ayers “was engaged in bombings which could have or did kill innocent peopleâ€¦” So McCain is saying that someone who engages in bombings which could have killed or did kill innocent people is a terrorist.

Now consider what McCain did. McCain flew a bomber, an A-4E Skyhawk, over North Vietnam. I don’t know whether he actually dropped his bombs before being shot down. But certainly he was engaged in actions that, if he had succeeded, could have killed innocent people. Which makes McCain, in his own words, a terrorist.

Now McCain could argue that that’s different because, as he said elsewhere in the interview, “I had a reconciliation with the Vietnamese, when we normalized relations.” Did he apologize to them? He didn’t say. If he did, that would make him a “repentant terrorist.” Too bad Stephanopoulos didn’t challenge him.

I Lied and I’m a Coward

I’m not a big fan of the New York Times, but today’s front-page investigative report on the Pentagon’s managing of the news is absolutely first-rate. One of the Pentagon officials, Torie Clarke, the Pentagon’s main propagandist, said her goal had been to achieve “information dominance.” In other words, she wanted the Pentagon’s message to get out and crowd out the independent information from others. To do this, the Pentagon recruited retired military officers and fed them select information that was often at odds with reality. Wow! I’m already sounding like a spin doctor. What I mean in the earlier sentence is that the Pentagon lied.
The payoff for many of these retired officers was that various “defense” contractors for whom they worked got a better shot at military contracts. [Why “defense” in quotation marks? Because most of what the Department of Defense does has nothing to do with defense: it’s offense, much of which makes us less safe.]
Interestingly, some of the retired military knew they were being lied to and passed the information on as truth nevertheless. In other words, they lied. One, General Paul E. Vallely, a FOX News analyst from 2001 to 2007, stated, “â€œI saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south [in Iraq.]” But on his return, Vallely told FOX’s Alan Colmes, â€œYou canâ€™t believe the progress,â€ and predicted that the number of insurgents would be “down to a few numbers” within months. Of course, it wasn’t. And it turned out that Vallely didn’t “believe the progress.”
How did they rationalize their lying? Take Timur J. Eads. Please. Eads is “a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.” Eads said he had withheld the truth on television for fear that a four-star general would call and say, “Kill that contract.” I’ve heard of people running from battle because they might be literally killed. And I’m sympathetic. But lying because the consequence of telling the truth is that your employer might lose business and you might get fired? Wowee. Pretty scary.
The whole article is well worth your time.

ICasualties Is Returning

After an absence of a couple of weeks, ICasualties.org is coming back online.

ICasualties.org is the best source for details on US casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They have compiled an extensive database of this information, which is sortable by state, city, time periods, rank, service, etc. They help to feed this information to Antiwar.com and much of the alternative and mainstream media.

ICasualties was recently the victim of a malicious cyber-attack which disabled their server and sent visitors to random sites. The perpetrators have not been identified. Our administrator, Michael Ewens, contacted their Webmaster, Michael White to offer advice on how to battle the attack. They expect to be getting more of their old content back up over the next several days.

It is important to resume linking to ICasualties.org to restore their previous high rankings on Google and other search engines. They do an important job and it is important to support them.

Congress Quietly Repeals Martial Law Provision

In late 2006, Congress revised the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act to make it far easier for a president to declare martial law. Those changes were repealed at the end of this January as part of Public Law 110-181 (HR 4986), the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (signed into law by President Bush on January 28, 2008).

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), who championed the opposition to the original law, was also the hero of the repeal. It helped that all the nationâ€™s governors opposed the 2006 law.

Boise State Professor Charlotte Twight, the author of the excellent Dependent on DC, alerted me to the change last night. I checked on Nexis and the only news coverage I found regarding the repeal was a 322-word Gannett News wire story from February 1 that focused on how the repeal made governors happy.

I first wrote about the Posse/Insurrection peril for American Conservative a year ago. My most recent piece on the subject was an article for the January issue of the Future of Freedom Foundationâ€™s (FFF) Freedom Daily. The law was changed between the time the piece was published and when FFF posted the January article online on April 9.

War Is an Economic Policy, Senator McCain

This morning I received a request to sign an â€œEconomistsâ€™ Statement in Support of John McCainâ€™s Economic Plan.â€ The statement laid out his plans to prevent taxes from rising, to reduce some taxes, such as the corporate income tax, to support free trade agreements, and to restrain the growth of domestic government spending. Notice something missing? I did.

Hereâ€™s the answer I sent to the co-chair, economist James Carter:

There’s nothing in there I disagree with. [I later found a few things but I agreed with the vast majority.] The problem is that it leaves out a huge part of his economic policy that will make it virtually impossible to achieve what’s in the statement. That huge part is his policy on war–with Iraq and maybe with Iran. War is very expensive and is part of an economic policy. So by signing the statement, I would be helping Senator McCain maintain the fiction that there’s no connection between war and economic policy. I’m unwilling to do that.

DC Freedom Rally Today

A couple hundred Ron Paul supporters gathered in front of the Capitol today to hear speakers organized by the Granny Warriors.

I stopped by mid afternoon. I was told by one attendee that â€œRon Paul came by and spoke around 11:15. Unfortunately, the sound system was not yet working at that point.â€ He said he had heard Congressman Paul might return and speak again later today.

Here are some pics – (Full size versions are available at my Flickr page here)

<img src=’http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3167/2417392868_381a585e15.jpg’ alt=” class=’alignnone’ /

UPDATE 4 17 08: Some commentors have suggested that I grossly undercounted the number of attendees. I note that the front page of the http://www.dailypaul.com website continues to highlight the photo I took of the rally.(The photo is used without permission or clear attribution). This photo and other photos posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bovard/ indicate the crowd size.