Antiwar.com Blog

On my radio show May 7th, I spoke with former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, who made a big splash April 26th at the first debate among Democrats seeking the nomination for president when he said that the “top tier” candidates all “frighten” him with their “all options must remain on the table for dealing with Iran” rhetoric and with his proposal to make it a felony for the president to continue the occupation of Iraq.

“Some of these people [the other candidates] frighten me. When you have mainline candidates that turn around and say “there’s nothing off the table with respect to Iran. That’s code for using nukes, nuclear devices. I’ve got to tell you, if I’m President of the United States, there will be no preemptive wars with nuclear devices. In my mind, it’s immoral, and it’s been immoral for the last 50 years as part of American foreign policy. …

“How do you get out? You pass the law, not a resolution, a law making it a felony to stay there.”

You can watch the debate on the Web or you can read the transcript here. Just Senator Gravel here.

I gave him an hour to elaborate on these ideas and others, including how the Iraq war has strengthened Iran’s position in the Middle East, their nuclear program, his proposal for opening friendly relations rather than threatening them, the neoconservatives’ doctrine of global hegemony, his plan for direct democracy and the U.S. military’s war against their veterans.

You can listen by clicking here. (58:54)

Senator Gravel enlisted in the U.S. Army (1951-54) and served as special adjutant in the Communication Intelligence Services and as a Special Agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps. He received a B.S. in Economics from Columbia University, New York City, and holds four honorary degrees in law and public affairs.

Mike Gravel served in the Alaska House of Representatives from 1963-66, and as Speaker from 1965-66. He then represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate from 1969-81. He served on the Finance, Interior, and Environmental and Public Works committees, chairing the Energy, Water Resources, Buildings and Grounds, and Environmental Pollution subcommittees.

In 1971, he waged a successful one-man filibuster for five months that forced the Nixon administration to cut a deal, effectively ending the draft in the United States. He is most prominently known for his release of the Pentagon Papers, the secret official study that revealed the lies and manipulations of successive U.S. administrations that misled the country into the Vietnam War. After the New York Times published portions of the leaked study, the Nixon administration moved to block any further publication of information and to punish any newspaper publisher who revealed the contents.

From the floor of the senate, Gravel (a junior senator at the time) insisted that his constituents had a right to know the truth behind the war and proceeded to read 4,100 pages of the 7,000 page document into the senate record. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Senator Gravel did not have the right and responsibility to share official documents with his constituents.

He then published The Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press (1971). This publication resulted in litigation, Gravel v. U.S., resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision (No. 71-1017-1026) relative to the Speech and Debate Clause (Article 1, Section 6) of the United States Constitution.

He has worked as a cab driver in New York City, a clerk on Wall Street and as a brakeman on the Alaska Railroad. He founded and served as president of The Democracy Foundation, Philadelphia II, and Direct Democracy, nonprofit corporations dedicated to the establishment of direct democracy in the United States through the enactment of the National Initiative for Democracy by American voters.

Other books authored by Senator Gravel are Jobs and More Jobs, and Citizen Power. He lectures and writes about governance, foreign affairs, economics, Social Security, tax reform, energy, environmental issues and democracy.

Former Alaska Senator and Democratic Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel discusses his plan for the Congress to criminalize the Iraq war, the cowardice of the Congress, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards’s aggressive position against Iran, his proposal for opening of friendly relations with them instead, how the Iraq war has strengthened Iran’s position in the region, the neoconservatives’ doctrine of global hegemony, Iran’s nuclear program, his plan for direct democracy and the U.S. military’s war against their veterans.

MP3 here. (58:54)

Senator Gravel enlisted in the U.S. Army (1951-54) and served as special adjutant in the Communication Intelligence Services and as a Special Agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps. He received a B.S. in Economics from Columbia University, New York City, and holds four honorary degrees in law and public affairs.

Mike Gravel served in the Alaska House of Representatives from 1963-66, and as Speaker from 1965-66. He then represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate from 1969-81. He served on the Finance, Interior, and Environmental and Public Works committees, chairing the Energy, Water Resources, Buildings and Grounds, and Environmental Pollution subcommittees.

In 1971, he waged a successful one-man filibuster for five months that forced the Nixon administration to cut a deal, effectively ending the draft in the United States. He is most prominently known for his release of the Pentagon Papers, the secret official study that revealed the lies and manipulations of successive U.S. administrations that misled the country into the Vietnam War. After the New York Times published portions of the leaked study, the Nixon administration moved to block any further publication of information and to punish any newspaper publisher who revealed the contents.

From the floor of the senate, Gravel (a junior senator at the time) insisted that his constituents had a right to know the truth behind the war and proceeded to read 4,100 pages of the 7,000 page document into the senate record. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Senator Gravel did not have the right and responsibility to share official documents with his constituents.

He then published The Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press (1971). This publication resulted in litigation, Gravel v. U.S., resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision (No. 71-1017-1026) relative to the Speech and Debate Clause (Article 1, Section 6) of the United States Constitution.

He has worked as a cab driver in New York City, a clerk on Wall Street and as a brakeman on the Alaska Railroad. He founded and served as president of The Democracy Foundation, Philadelphia II, and Direct Democracy, nonprofit corporations dedicated to the establishment of direct democracy in the United States through the enactment of the National Initiative for Democracy by American voters.

Books authored by Senator Gravel are Jobs and More Jobs, and Citizen Power. He lectures and writes about governance, foreign affairs, economics, Social Security, tax reform, energy, environmental issues and democracy.

I turn on the television. Somehow, I must have slept longer than I thought. It’s already the middle of 2008 and the presidential debates are going on.

The Democrat is Mike Gravel, and he’s attacking the war. He is saying he wants to pull out of Iraq immediately. He promises never to preemptively nuke Iran. How did he get the nomination?

The Republican on stage is Ron Paul. He agrees with Gravel. He wants to go further and end the US foreign policy of imperialism and constant world policing altogether.

I’m surprised to see the Libertarian, Green and Constitution Party represented in the debate, too. Amazingly, all three of them are against the war and want America’s troops to come home. Fortunately, the Libertarians actually nominated a libertarian and not a warmonger, as is always my fear.

I wake up, disappointed. What a wonderful dream, though: The national political scene mostly staging a debate over domestic policy, where everyone agrees for once that the US should stop trying to rule the whole world.

Well, the United States used to have more of a non-interventionist consensus. There was a time both major parties eschewed international imperialism, as opposed to both supporting it. A dedication to peace with all nations once united Americans from across the spectrum.

The government does what it does with the tacit consent of the people. Unfortunately, public ideology has become imperialist. The right has become plagued at various times by Cold War belligerence and then later by neocon fantasies of democratic internationalism. The left has long been inconsistent, favoring many wars, especially Democratic ones, in the name of democratization and human rights.

But ideology is changing, and eventually the politics will reflect it. As Alexander Cockburn notes, only Gravel and Paul get it: Americans are getting sick of the war. Sooner or later, the major parties will have to bend to this trend if it continues.

Antiwar ideology relies on information and communication. Thank goodness for Antiwar.com, which has done so much to show people everywhere the truth about US foreign policy. It is impossible to measure exactly the influence of any one antiwar writer or activist, but without Antiwar.com, constantly speaking truth to the war power, constantly keeping the hawks in check, I am confident we’d be much worse off.

Ideas will eventually be what kicks the war party out of power, and gives voters a choice of at least one major peace candidate. One day, the American consensus might once again be pro-peace and it will be harder to drag the nation on a crazed war based on lies and utopian fantasies.

Help Antiwar.com move the country in that direction. We are coming at a crossroads for America, where the public can reassess our disastrous foreign policy, or be duped by a whole new slate of propaganda for a war with Iran. It really is up to getting the information out there. Help AWC do its great work for peace at this crucial time.

Last week, it was announced that NATO’s anti-Taliban raids in Kandahar province had killed approximately 50 civilians. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for his part, let it be known that he is ‘losing patience’ with all the civilians NATO has been killing. As the US simultaneously denied that any such thing had happened and promised to look into it and insisted that it was entirely the Taliban’s fault, NATO officials insisted that in the future they would try to keep the civilian massacres to a minimum.

Needless to say, this is quite a messy situation. Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema warned that the civilian death toll could cost the US the support of Afghanistan’s civilian population (to the extent they ever had it). This is one of those situations that needs to be treated with kid gloves.

Fast forward to Friday, and Afghan officials say that days after the initial killings: the very day NATO promised to be more careful in the future in fact, a US bombing attack killed 13 more civilians. Needless to say, the Pentagon once again had no information that such an incident had ever taken place, but they promised to look into it… again.

Right about now, a lot of you are probably thinking this story sounds kind of familiar. In fact, it happens with surprising regularity, the civilian body counts, the initial denial, the eventually admissions, Karzai’s mock outrage, even the part where NATO promises to make wholesale changes so it doesn’t happen again.

What efforts NATO has actually undertaken in the past (or will undertake in the present incident) I’m not sure, but one thing is painfully obviously to the civilian population living under their occupation, it’s not good enough. NATO troops have killed civilians in at least 12 separate reported incidents in 2007 alone: their bodycount since this ill-conceived war began must simply be astronomical. Most of us manage to get through our entire lives without slaughtering dozens of innocent villagers: is it to much to ask that NATO manage to go more than a few weeks in-between atrocities?

Three more names have just been added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC—thirty-two years after the war ended. One was actually killed by “friendly fire” in 1966. The other two died recently from wounds they received during the Vietnam War. There are probably hundreds of additional  names that could be added, but Victims of Agent Orange and suicides from PTSD are not eligible. The total number of names inscribed on “The Wall” is now 58,256. And what did they die for? They died for the same thing that U.S. soldiers are currently dying for in Iraq—a lie.

Will U.S. soldiers still be dying thirty years from now because of the wounds they received in Iraq? Will we still have troops in Iraq in thirty years? Why not? We still have troops in Japan, Germany, and Korea.

Apropos yesterday’s “Tenet v. Perle” post, it might be useful to note that James Woolsey, Perle’s colleague on the Defense Policy Board (DPB) and fellow-board member of any number of neoconservative groups, was virtually ubiquitous on television and in the print media in the week that followed the 9/11 attacks, suggesting to anyone who would listen that Saddam was not only linked to al Qaeda, but may very well have played a role in the attacks themselves.

Given close and multiple associations with Perle, Woolsey’s remarks in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks make completely implausible Perle’s statement in his recent and controversial “The Case for War” production on PBS that, “I didn’t hear statements to the effect that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.”

In any event, here are some examples of Woolsey’s wisdom on the subject of Iraq’s possible complicity in the 9/11 attacks over the ensuing couple of day. I suspect he repeated that wisdom in the DPB meetings chaired by Perle a few days later.

September 11th, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer: “Day of Terror”:

“But I think the key thing is what David said earlier about nation states — because Iraq has a lot of incentives to damage the United States heavily. There was an FBI agent in charge of the early investigation of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Jim Fox, who had the view that there may well have been Iraqi government involvement in that. The Clinton administration, Justice Department, brushed that aside after the time but some of the information that came out at trial that had been under grand jury secrecy during the investigation looks as if there may well have been Iraqi government involvement. And this time this administration, I hope and trust, will not brush aside the idea that there might be state involvement. We may well find that Osama bin Laden or some other terrorist group in the MidEast or elsewhere, probably the MidEast, is behind this. But they may well be a subcontractor or a junior partner. There conceivably could be a state behind this.”

September 11th, ABC News Special Report: “America Under Attack”:

“But there is at least a plausible case that there was Iraqi government involvement in the World Trade Center bombing back in 1993. This all has to do with the identity, the true identity of Ramsey Yousef, who was the mastermind, who’s in prison out in Colorado now. At his sentencing the judge said, ‘We still don’t really know who you are.’ And if there was a chance that there was Iraqi government involvement in that, since Yousef was the mastermind of the World Trade Center and of a bombing plot in the Pacific which he was working on when he was caught, to have a lot of American Airlines in the Pacific blown up, what happened today is a sort of amalgam of the earlier two Ramsey Yousef plots. It’s at least, I think, interesting that that’s the case. And–and if some of the observers, Laurie Mylroie and others, are correct that there’s a reasonable chance that he was, in fact, involved with the Iraqi government, there could also be a chance the Iraqi government is involved here, even if bin Laden or other terrorist groups are as well.”

“But it’s not impossible that terrorist groups could work together with the government, that–the Iraqi government has been quite closely involved with a number of Sunni terrorist groups and–and on some matters has had contact with bin Laden.”

September 12th, NBC News, “Attack on America”:

“And one thing, again, coming back to Iraq, you need to realize is that a number of these fundamentalist groups and individuals, have increasingly close relationships with Iraq. The Bath Party, Saddam’s party, historically was like the Communist Party, was an anti-religious party. But a decade or so ago, that began to change, and Saddam has gone out of his way to make common cause with some of these fundamentalist terrorist groups, and they with him. It’s a–it’s a very unhappy alliance.

“And one final point here, Tom, we may not in this case be dealing solely with autonomous terrorist organizations. There are a number of indications that bin Laden’s group was involved–that may well turn out to be true, indeed they may have been the central operators, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be some state sponsorship or guidance or assistance behind them. And one candidate for that, one possible candidate, is the government of Iraq.”

September 12th, CNN “America Under Attack“:

“It may be all over these attacks. And I think that might make us a bit suspicious that is something else might be up. Certainly bin Laden may well have been deeply involved and may have been the operational figure and his people in this, but that doesn’t mean that he acted alone.

“When I see Bin Laden issuing fatwahs, religious edicts, putting out videotapes, issuing poems, having his subordinates talk about how they’re taking part in terrorism against the United States, I begin to think that maybe we’re supposed to focus solely on Bin Laden. And there might be something else in train.

“My suspicion – it’s no more than that at this point – is that there could be some government action involved together with Bin Laden or a major terrorist group. And one strong suspect there I think would be the government of Iraq.

“But he (Bush) used a word, ‘harbor,’ which he used last night. A harbor for terrorists might be, say, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But there may be more involved than harbors here, there may be a government other than a harbor, such as the Iraqi government, that is orchestrating this to some extent, funding it, working closely on it behind bin Laden or some other terrorist group. I very much hope the Bush administration, unlike Clinton administration, will not set aside this possibility and assume that everything is just a terrorist group, even a terrorist group as major as bin Laden’s. It really need to look carefully at the possibility there may be state sponsorship here, and I think the most likely, certainly not the only possibility is Iraq.”

September 12th, Los Angeles Times, “Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold” (op-ed coauthored by Woolsey and Mansoor Ijaz):

“The planning, coordination and access to information required to carry out the virtually simultaneous attacks in New York and Washington point significantly to the involvement of state sponsorship. The diplomatic cover, intelligence data and financial resources needed to conduct this war against the United States can only be offered by a regime whose track record against U.S. interests is proven, and Iraq comes immediately to mind.”