Antiwar.com Blog

I don’t believe much in the way of assertions from the Department of Justice, but somehow this part of the LA Times coverage of the Ft. Dix “terrorist plot” rings true to me:

“A paid FBI informant was able to infiltrate the group, and began taping many conversations with the men – some by phone, others by wearing a wire.”

And this too,

“One FBI official in Washington, however, noted that there still was much not known about the men and their intentions. They allegedly had discussed trying to kill hundreds of people on the base with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

“This is some guys who wanted to get a bunch of guns and shoot up some people. When – or if – they were going to shoot, we don’t know,” said the FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.”

Sounds like more informant/provocateur driven wolf cries to me. And just in time to make an impression on Jose Padilla’s jurors too.

Maybe George Bush the Lesser (current approval rating 28%) will be able to use that great fear boost that served him so well during the campaign of 2004.

The year is 1939, and the Soviet Union has just signed a non-aggression pact called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. While the effects of this pact were myriad and far-reaching, what interests us here is the secret portion of the document dividing up the land in between the two rapidly growing empires. The tiny nation of Estonia, which only 20 years prior had successfully fought a war of independence against the Soviet Union, was handed back to the Soviets, and the Red Army marched in two months later to formally occupy and eventually annex it.

The Soviet military police were quick to root out (read: execute) opposition to their occupation, and a few months later, when the German-Soviet pact fell apart, the Red Army forced thousands of young Estonians into conscription. Estonia was the battleground of many violent German-Soviet clashes over the next few years.

Having twice fought Soviet invasions, and considering tens of thousands of Estonians were deported to Siberia in the post-war period, it is unsurprising that many people in Estonia don’t look back terribly fondly on their half century of Soviet occupation. It should not have come as a surprise then, either, when in April the Estonian government decided to move a large Soviet monument to the glories of the Red Army from the center of their capital city.

Perhaps more surprising is what happened next. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned the move as ‘blasphemy’, and a resolution of the Russian Senate condemned Estonian officials as ‘neo-nazis’. All over a statue.

And that’s not all: the Russian Duma called for harsh economic sanctions and a few days later, as Moscow protesters hurled rocks at the Estonian embassy, the Russian government cut off oil and coal exports to the tiny Baltic republic. All over a statue.

And even that’s not the end of it. While Estonia and Russia continue to bicker over what ought to be a relatively minor matter, it spirals into an enormous international incident. The European Union has criticized Russia for its reaction, and NATO has warned Russia to crack down on the protesters. Russia, for its part, has lashed out at Western ‘connivance’ with Estonia.

Did I mention this whole thing is about a statue?

Geoffrey Perret discusses his new book Commander In Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future and how the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq and the consequences for Americans.

MP3 here. (16:57)

Geoffrey Perret was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He was enlisted in the U.S. Army for three years and is the author of the acclaimed books Ulysses S. Grant and Eisenhower. He lives in England with his wife.

for women. Not only are military sexual assaults on the rise (there were about 3,000 assaults reported last year–up 24%), at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs woman’s trauma recovery program in Palo Alto, Calif., 78 percent of women being treated for PTSD were admitted with military sexual trauma. It is time to quit sending women to Iraq. It is also time to quit sending men to Iraq. Let’s bring the troops home to their families now.

Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.) is no stranger to war. He signed up with the Marines in 1964 and went to Vietnam in the grimmest, bloodiest days of the war. He survived a shot to the chest, and spent the decades afterward studying foreign policy, history, and why nations go to war.

Gilchrest supported the 2002 authorization for war against Iraq: “Blessed are the peacemakers who freed Europe from the yoke of Nazism,” he said in a floor speech. “Blessed are the peacemakers whose save people of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. It is not a matter for us as peacemakers of if we go into Iraq. It is a matter of when we do it, how we do it, and who we do it with.”

Within two years of that vote, after taking multiple trips to Iraq, Gilchrest repudiated that decision. He has become a member of the small but vocal antiwar Republican caucus in Congress.

Reason Magazine’s David Weigel has a revealing in-depth interview with Gilchrest today.

Remember how I dreamt of more national dialogue on the war from a sane perspective? It seems the Washington Post has the precise opposite hope: They want the antiwar candidates, Ron Paul and Mike Gravel, out of the debates. These debates are “cluttered,” apparently, by too much focus on the evil of US imperialism, which is bankrupting Americans, corrupting our culture, and recruiting more fanatics in anti-American terror groups.

After all, why confuse the American public with off-topic, taboo talk of how the maniacs of the War Party still want to nuke Iran, or talk about how the US shouldn’t be policing the world in the first place? Shouldn’t we instead hear the six or seven respectable candidates from each party, discussing the ins and outs of health care and trade policy that none of them understand, or waxing passionate and empty on who is the real champion of God, country, equality, family, the middle class, safe schools, safe neighborhoods, a clean environment and a strong economy?

Paul and Gravel actually say something important, and thus they are just too fringe. There you have it: The supposedly liberal Washington Post is as much a shill for the establishment, including the warfare state, as any other paper or network. Don’t rock the boat.

Those who know that there’s an alternative to this establishment press, a news source that understands that war should be a mainstream issue, discussed in every debate with more substance than “we should support the troops and win this thing by stopping it from being mismanaged,” can help keep the flame of truth alive by going here.

Thanks to Lew Rockwell for the Wash Post link.