Antiwar.com Blog

This week Ron Paul introduced the ‘American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007’ to roll back the power of the federal government by restoring support for the US Constitution.

The bill would, among other things, repeal the Military Commissions Act of 2006, prohibits “extraordinary rendition,” and the use of secret evidence.

Ron Paul spoke on the floor of the House when he introduced the bill.

The driving force behind the legislation are two groups: the conservative American Freedom Agenda and the liberal American Freedom Campaign. Naomi Wolf wrote about the bill.

We urge everyone to contact their representatives to support this bill.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

In a further indication of Robert Gates’ efforts to move U.S. policy closer to the center a la Baker-Hamilton, he has appointed John Hamre, the former deputy defense secretary under Bill Clinton, to head the Defense Policy Board (DPB), the advisory body that played an important role under Richard Perle’s chairmanship immediately after 9/11 in moving U.S. policy toward war with Iraq. (At Perle’s invitation, Ahmad Chalabi took part in its supposedly highly classified deliberations just a few days after 9/11, and many of the DPB’s members at the time – including James Woolsey, Eliot Cohen, Kenneth Adelman, as well as Perle himself – became the most ubiquitous cheerleaders for war 18 months that followed.)

Hamre has served as president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) here since 2000 and is known to have been both very sceptical of the case for war before the invasion and highly critical of the occupation after it. Consistent with his career as a Washington national-security insider, however, he has generally preferred to voice his views privately, rather than publicly, a practice that has, according to knowledgeable sources, caused him some considerable moral regret, which makes his selection by Gates all the more interesting. It is also notable that Gates chose as yet another new DPB member Hamre’s former boss under Clinton, William Perry.

Aside from those two choices, however, Gates played to the right in his new appointments to the Board, choosing three former administration hawks: former Deputy National Security Adviser J.D. Crouch; former State Department arms-control honcho, Robert Joseph; and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Peter Rodman; as well as the just-retired chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Peter Pace.

Despite the addition of Hamre and Perry, the Board is still dominated by Rumsfeld’s appointees and will retain a decidedly hawkish cast. Prominent neo-conservatives who remain include Devon Gaffney Cross (whom I have previously profiled), China specialist Aaron Friedberg; Ruth Wedgewood of the School of Advanced International Studies; and James Q. Wilson. Other hard-liners include former Rumsfeld spokesperson Victoria Clarke; ret. Adm. Vern Clark; Newt Gingrich; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Reagan, Fred Ikle; ret. Gen. (and Surge architect) Jack Keane; Rodman mentor, Henry Kissinger; ret. Gen. (and Rumsfeld poodle) Richard Myers; Nadia Schadlow; former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger; Smith Richardson Foundation exec (who also worked as Afghanistan Policy Coordinator in Rumsfeld’s office, Marin Strmecki; former Republican Rep. Vin Weber; and former Rumsfeld aide, Christopher Williams. (Incidentally Strmecki, Devon Cross, and Schadlow have all worked at Smith Richardson. The only other member who is identifiable as a Democrat is Jimmy’s Carter’s former Pentagon chief, Harold Brown.

Hamre’s choice has definitely raised some right-wing hackles, as the Washington Times‘ national-security reporter Bill Gertz assailed the new chairman as a “pacifist” (presumably because he defended the 1972 ABM Treaty, among other things that the Bush administration repudiated). In his weekly column, “Inside the Ring,” Gertz quoted one Pentagon “official,” as saying, “With or without his approval, President Bush’s team has apparently begun the transition to the third Clinton administration. We can see now that with the possible exception of the president himself, their hearts and minds just never were into governing as Republicans.” [I know a lot of Republicans who would agree with that, albeit not in the sense that the official meant it!] Another official quoted by Gertz questioned Hamre’s “credentials for the job, other than the deluded notion that somehow giving a Clintonite a board seat might make Hillary, should she win, more amenable to the department.”

As I said here — and, earlier, here — the whole Syrian “nuclear” facility that the Israelis supposedly took out, in a faux-replay of the Osirak narrative, turned out to be a hoax:

“According to current and former intelligence sources, the US intelligence community has seen no evidence of a nuclear facility being hit. US intelligence ‘found no radiation signatures after the bombing, so there was no uranium or plutonium present,’ said one official, wishing to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the subject. ‘We don’t have any independent intelligence that it was a nuclear facility — only the assertions by the Israelis and some ambiguous satellite photography from them that shows a building, which the Syrians admitted was a military facility.’”

Now that the IAEA is has the satellite photos, the truth is about to come out:

One of the diplomats indicated that the photos came from U.S intelligence. Two others said the images, which have been studied by experts of the International Atomic Energy Agency since being received on Thursday, do not at first examination appear to substantiate reports that the target was a nuclear installation, but emphasized that the images were still under examination.

The serial liars running our foreign policy don’t care if their deceptions are exposed: the value of lying is the impression it leaves. Many heard about the Syrian “nukes,” few will notice the debunking.

Follow the money, as the old saying goes:

“The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street’s favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama.”

The military-industrial complex is clearly betting on the Democrats, who, for the first time, are beating out the GOP in raising money from the war profiteers. What’s more, they’ve clearly settled on Hillary as their horse in this race, and here’s the numbers:

“So far, Mrs Clinton has received $52,600 in contributions from individual arms industry employees. That is more than half the sum given to all Democrats and 60 per cent of the total going to Republican candidates. Election fundraising laws ban individuals from donating more than $4,600 but contributions are often ‘bundled’ to obtain influence over a candidate.”

Yes, but, as she put it recently — I believe it was at the dailykos conference — lobbyists are people, too. They need to be represented — and Hillary will certainly do that. End the war? Withdraw from Iraq? Re-evaluate American foreign policy? Not on your life.

Even monkeys and apes are clever enough to use the threat of a common enemy as a way of reducing within-group tensions. Frans de Waal has seen wild baboons resolve a dispute by jointly threatening the members of another baboon troop, and chimpanzees in a zoo making aggressive “wraaa” calls in the direction of the cheetah enclosure, though no cheetah was visible. “The need for a common enemy can be so great that a substitution is fabricated,” says de Waal. “I have seen long-tailed macaques run to the swimming pool to threaten their own images in the water; a dozen tense monkeys unified against the ‘other’ group in the pool.”

In the absence of a common enemy, or of a common goal that can be achieved only if everyone pulls together, groups tend to fall apart into a collection of individuals or smaller groups.

– The Nurture Assumption, by Judith Rich Harris

More science here.

Yes, Benito Giuliani’s foreign policy team is very … Halloweenish. In addition to Daniel “Ethinc Cleanser” Pipes, we have one Martin Kramer, as profiled by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“‘Academic colleagues, get used to it,’ warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. ‘Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night.”

Kramer’s “Campus Watch” is devoted to harrassing anyone on campus who doesn’t kowtow to The Lobby. How would you like to see him as, say, Secretary of Education?

If Rudy makes it to the White House, and you’re an academic, especially one involved in the realm of Middle Eastern studies, get ready for the knock on the schoolhouse door at night  ….