Raimondo, Penn, Sheehan Protest 5 Years in Iraq in SF 3/16/08

Antiwar.com Editorial Director Justin Raimondo will be speaking in San Francisco, CA this Sunday, March 16th at “Iraq: 5 Years Too Many,” an event marking the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Actor Sean_Penn (a longtime activist who recently lent his voice to the documentary “War Made Easy”) and Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan are headlining the evening, which will also feature Reverend Gregory Stewart, Senior Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church, and Matt Gonzalez, former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

If you’re in the area, the program will begin at 5pm on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin Street (near Geary) in San Francisco. After the speakers finish, attendees will march to the War Memorial Auditorium on Van Ness Avenue to read the names of Americans and Iraqis killed in the war. There is a suggested donation of $5-$10 for the evening, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. The program is sponsored by the Iraq Moratorium – SF Bay Area and other local peace groups. More info: http://www.iraqmoratorium-sfbay.org or (415) 776-4580.

If you’re in the US, but not near the SF Bay Area, and want to get out and protest 5 years too many in Iraq next week, you can look at United for Peace & Justice’s map of local actions here.

McCain Again Supports Torture

John McCain voted to uphold Bush’s veto of the latest anti-torture legislation to pass Congress.

McCain also voted against the initial version of this law that would ban waterboarding by U.S. government agents.

McCain also voted for the final version of the Military Comissions Act in September 2006. By giving Bush boundless discretion to define torture, this law effectively guaranteed that the U.S. government would continue torturing.

Has anybody compiled a list of all the times the media has praised McCain for opposing torture, despite his groveling at Bush’s demands for absolute power to punish detainees however he pleases?

Everything You Need to Know About Alan Dershowitz

From the continuing series “A Terror Tour of Israel” at Slate.com:

[A]t another stop on the tour, we were introduced to Haim Ben Ami, a former head of interrogations at Shin Bet. He strolled across the stage like a movie director explaining a difficult scene to his audience. […]

Ben Ami likes stories and has a flair for drama. Asked by a member of our tour what he would do if his own daughter’s life were at stake, he tapped his prosthetic leg, noting that he had already been a victim of a terror attack (a grenade was thrown at him). But Ben Ami’s best stories are about times when it might be useful to torture terrorists, like in the case of a pair of terrorists captured while crossing into Israel to set off a bomb in Tel Aviv. They were tortured during interrogation and gave up information on their comrades. Then what?

“So, I made a suggestion,” Ben Ami said. “After the interrogation, we should bring these two guys back to the water, we put their head in water—bloop, bloop, bloop!—and let them float to Dead Sea. In the morning, two bodies in the Dead Sea, it happens.”

Ben Ami’s story, it turns out, was made up, a scenario meant to provoke discussion. Like a good TV show, it was often hard to tell where Ben Ami’s stories crossed over into fiction. In his own version of a “ripped from the headlines” story, he recalled giving a lecture to law students at Harvard at the invitation of well-known professor Alan Dershowitz. He recounted to the students Shin Bet’s involvement in delivering a suspected terrorist to the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon in 1983. The Israelis, Ben Ami said, had knowledge of a planned attack on the United States, but they knew no details. As Ben Ami recalled, the Israelis told the Americans: “Take him, make an interrogation, and we wish you success.”

Except the suspect wouldn’t talk. “He said: ‘Look, I wish to talk, but I’m very tired. I’d like to fall asleep for at least two hours.'” The suspect was taken, at his request, to a nearby apartment to sleep. The next day, the embassy was destroyed.

The story is a powerful argument in favor of torture—or at least enhanced interrogations—except for one problem: Like Ben Ami’s other story of the drowned terrorists (and most stories involving a “ticking time bomb”), it’s apocryphal. It never happened. Real life is never that clean-cut. Ben Ami, however, forgot to reveal that to the Harvard law students.

Realizing his mistake later that day, Ben Ami panicked. “I called Alan Dershowitz and said, ‘It’s wrong.'” As Ben Ami recalled, Dershowitz told him not to worry: “He said, ‘No, it’s a good story, leave it.'”

Monday’s entry is also worth a read. More on Dershowitz here, here, and here.

Obama Appeals to Libertarians

From the Wall Street Journal [via David Boaz]: Barack Obama, campaigning in Wyoming, appeals to libertarians:

“Tailoring his message to the state’s antigovernment streak, Sen. Obama put new emphasis on his criticisms of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps and other heightened law-enforcement activities implemented as antiterror measures. ‘You can be liberal and a libertarian, or a conservative libertarian,’ Sen. Obama told a crowd of about 1,200 at a recreation center here. But ‘there’s nothing conservative’ about President Bush’s antiterror policies. ‘There’s nothing Republican about that. Everybody should be outraged by that,’ he added.”

Boaz, a bigwig over at the ostensibly libertarian Cato Institute, qualifies his bouquet with a brickbat, claiming that Obama also said he wants to “undermine trade agreements” (i.e. NAFTA), but as the late Murray Rothbard and Paul pointed out, NAFTA isn’t “free trade,” it’s an exemplar of managed trade. As for all those “goodies from the Treasury” he says Obama wants to hand out — well, as I pointed out in my column, this morning, Obama is no Ron Paul. But, then again, Paul didn’t measure up to Boaz’s stratospheric standards, either ….

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