Sara Olson

Dissent in the Ranks: Many soldiers oppose and resist participation in Iraq war

Sara Olson discusses the rights and plight of antiwar soldiers, many who have refused to participate, others who will fight despite their opposition to the war, those who have risked their own liberty to take a principled stand against the war and what soldiers really think about domestic dissent.

MP3 here. (23:57)

Sarah Olson is an independent journalist and radio producer based in Oakland, Calif.

Sniveling Media Exposed

Bill Moyers Journal  episode on “Buying the War” on PBS is a great expose on how media groveling to Bush administration falsehoods and absurdities helped lead to the Iraq war.

The program focuss on the villains and bootlickers in the press.  It also contained interviews with some of the courageous reporters – such as Warren Stroebel and Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder – who saw through & reported the Bush administration’s frauds months before the war began.   Charles Hanley, an Associated Press reporter who went with the UN inspection teams in Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003, talked about how editors would delete his comments about how the Bush administration’s claims on WMDs were being proven wrong.   Norman Solomon, the author of War Made Easy,  made excellent comments on the institutional cowardice and groveling of the mainstream media.   Unfortunately, the program did not include any reference to Antiwar.com’s truth-telling long before “Shock and Awe” hit Baghdad.

Dan Rather told Moyers that in every newsroom in the country, there is fear of getting “the reputation of being a troublemaker” – thus making journalists and editors shy away from challenging the honesty of the White House.

Dan Rather at least had the gumption to be interviewed, despite some disgraceful things he said on the air after 9/11 about kowtowing to Bush.  Almost all  the chickenhawk columnists and pundits chickened out – didn’t even have the gumption to sit down in front of  Moyers and defend themselves.

If you get a chance to see the program (it airs at a different time in various PBS markets), it is definitely worth catching.   The transcript is already online here. 

Comments on this topic are welcome at my blog here.

Investigate the War Party

At last, the Democrats are moving on the let’s-investigate-how-they-lied-us-into-war front, with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California) homing in on what Waxman describes as a “fabricated claim that Iraq sought uranium in Niger.” Waxman’s Government Oversight Committee has issued a subpoena to Condi Rice: apparently the California congressman isn’t just grandstanding — he means business.

The Niger uranium mystery has always seemed to me to be the Achilles heel of the War Party: here we have the President of the United States uttering those fateful 16 words based on a cache of documents that turned out to be forgeries. And not even good forgeries, but pathetically crude renditions of purported “correspondence” between Saddam Hussein and the President of Niger. A simple Google search, plus a modicum of common sense, would have convinced the most eager-to-believe to dump this “intelligence” in the trash. Yet, somehow, it passed muster — in spite of George Tenet’s militant misgivings — and went into Bush’s 2003 state of the union speech to buttress the claim that Iraq was actively pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Some questions:

Who was pushing this phony “intelligence”?

How did they manage to get around the vetting process?

And, most intriguingly: who forged the documents?

We’ve been asking these questions at Antiwar.com for some time now, and come up with some tentative answers, while calling for a congressional investigation. It will be interesting to see if the Waxman committee digs as deep as it needs to in order to get at the truth.

UPDATE: This just in:

“Condoleezza Rice said Thursday she has already answered the questions she has been subpoenaed to answer before a U.S. congressional committee and suggested she is not inclined to comply with the order.”

This is a mistake, but then again this administration never learns. The last time she tried to pull this, she wound up relenting. Now she is “hinting” once again that she’s going to go into her diva act. Stay tuned ….