Antiwar.com Blog

In case you missed it, here’s Cato Institute scholar Arnold Kling writing at TCS Daily last month:

I believe that what we need going forward is a policy of disarming Muslims. I believe that we must keep devout Muslims away from weapons, and keep weapons away from devout Muslims. I can work with Muslims, send my children to school with Muslims, and be friends with Muslims. I do not have an issue with their religion, as long as they do not have weapons. However, the combination of weapons and Islam poses unacceptable danger to the rest of us.

I guess the right to bear arms is, er, faith-based. Who knew?

Philip Weiss, over at the New York Observer, is always a good source of information, and here is his take on the thinktank situation and how it relates to U.S. policy toward Israel:

“As we are frequently told, universities belong to the left. The academy is like an internment camp, the one place they can put ’em all; and it’s become more and more irrelevant to policy-making. But the Washington thinktanks are camped next to the corridors of power. ,,,

“Indeed, this is one of the most important points in the Walt-Mearsheimer paper that set off this debate: in the last generation, rich liberal ponds like Brookings and Carnegie were stocked with pro-Israeli carp; pro-Arab fish simply disappeared. It’s not a conspiracy, but acts of devotion: Conservative Jewish backers, recognizing the importance of thinktanks to the formulation of policy, have forcibly established an orthodoxy of opinion here.

” … Here are a few data points. Roger Hertog, chairman of the rightwing Manhattan Institute—’turning intellect into influence,’ is their brag—got choked up at the annual dinner last year describing his core commitment to Israel. His friend and co-New-York-Sun-backer Bruce Kovner chairs the American Enterprise Institute, which gave a home to Dick and Lynne Cheney in days gone by, gives Likudnik Jerusalemite Dore Gold $96,000 a year for what it’s not clear, and has stocked the White House with neocons like Richard Perle who opposed the Oslo peace process and the idea of land-for-peace and came up with Baghdad-for-peace instead. Or there is Dennis Ross’s sock, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, whose views are epitomized by the former chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces who served as a distinguished military fellow last year when he was sued for alleged war crimes at Qana in Lebanon (the last time, in ’96, not this time)(and sued by the Center for Constitutional Rights.) Or Martin Indyk’s spot, Brookings’ Saban Center, financed by ‘a fanatic Zionist billionaire’ Israeli (per Alexander Cockburn), from which Ken Pollack launched the Iraq war for liberals with a book that as I have pointed out before spoke many times about vague Arab/Israeli ‘troubles’ and their importance to the Arab street without once using the word occupation. (Israeli officials don’t like to say occupation; they prefer “administered territories.”) Move on to libertarian Cato, where I am told scholars were warned to pull in their horns on Israel last year lest they endanger funding. Or to the place all these guys get to ski, the Aspen Institute, to which the brilliant Anatol Lieven was never invited again after bringing up the occupation as a source of Arab rage at a 2002 conference discussing the sources of Arab rage. Or the Carnegie Institute for International Something or Other, where Lieven, then a fellow, became a ‘pariah’ after publishing a book that was sharply critical of Israel, and from which he soon debarked for the underfunded Center for American Progress.“

I’m not surprised at the pro-Israel bias of the thinktanks cited above, including the pressure put on the “libertarian” Cato Institute, which said practically nothing about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon except to object when the U.S. evacuated its citizens from Lebanon — after all, why should taxpayers pay for getting our people out of Lebanon? Wasn’t it enough that we paid for the Israeli bombs that were landing on their heads?

 

The Washington Post’s Tom Toles has a cartoon on Congress and torture that is worth its weight in thumbscrews.

The cartoon perfectly captures how Congress is partnering with the Bush administration in sanctioning U.S. barbarity. The cartoon is here – at least for today (9/26).

Yet, as long as congressmen blindfold themselves to any and all atrocities committed with their approval, they will likely consider themselves blameless.

And people ask me why I drink. [Comments welcome at my blog]

In Monday’s edition of his biweekly column, “The Wartime Economist,” Antiwar.com’s David R. Henderson takes on George Shultz of the Committee on the Present Danger and the best case the War Party can make for continuing the failed “war on terror.” Tough luck there, George.

David’s article reminds me of retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski‘s story about Shultz’s fax to Secretary of Wars Rumsfeld in the summer of 2002. As she recounted to C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb,

“I’ll tell you something about George Shultz, that – there was a fax that came into the office. It wasn’t for me. I happened to get it, and I looked at this fax. It was a short note from George Shultz, who was on – who at that time, I don’t know if he still is – but he was on the Defense Policy Board, along with Richard Perle. It was a fax, a copy of a fax that he had sent to Don Rumsfeld in June of 2002, June of 2002 I believe it was. It was the summer of 2002.

“And on this fax, it was a short, one-note thing, from Shultz to Rummy. Basically, we have to get together and talk about what we do after the victory in Iraq, and this was in the summer of 2002, long before even the president and the vice president had begun their round of why we fight-type propaganda speeches.”

“What to do after the victory in Iraq”? This may be a reference to the funneling of billions of government dollars into the Bechtel corporation, which gets paid to do nothing but show up and stand around in America’s never-ending series of global interventions. George Shultz, it seems, has a vested interest in being so full of it.

(One might even conclude that since Roosevelt turned America into the “Arsenal of Democracy,” those whose business it is to maintain that arsenal and rebuild what it destroys spend a portion of those collected tax-payer dollars on getting their stooges to positions of power in order to keep those tax-dollars flowing.)

There are some who think that Saddam’s mid-1980s refusal to pay then-Secretary of State Shultz (who had come to government “service” directly from the presidency of Bechtel) and his former company to build an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Red Sea – a major topic of discussion between Rumsfeld and Hussein when they met in 1983 – was the beginning of the end of the era of Republican-Baathist good feelings which had survived Hussein’s use of chemical weapons and America’s treachery in selling missiles to the Ayatollah.

It wasn’t long before James Baker III was “emphasizing the instruction” to U.S. ambassador April Glaspie to invite Saddam to go ahead and invade Kuwait, setting Saddam up for “Operation Desert Storm” and the people of Saudi Arabia for a permanent garrison of American troops to enforce the blockade and launch the no-fly zone bombings – which, as we all know, is the reason for Osama’s gang’s war against the United States.

Since the second war against Iraq, which Shultz promoted inside and outside the halls of state power, the terrorists have been given a new cause for their recruiting and a massive new base within which to train their new generation of recruits.

Now this man has the gumption and gall to pose as an expert on fighting terrorism and on why more of these disasterous wars should be waged. Perhaps we should send Mr. Shultz to fight this phony war of his and let the people who joined the military under the pretext that their job was to protect America come home.

(Comments welcome at Stress)

The key players in the U.S. Senate have agreed with the Bush administration to retroactively legalize torture by U.S. government agents. The compromise deal struck yesterday will block prosecution for CIA officials who tortured detainees since 9/11.  I would expect that, in the name of “fair play,” someone will begin pushing similar legislation to give immunity to U.S. military officials who tortured detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The legislative “compromise” blocks detainees from suing in federal court after they have been tortured.  Game, set, match.

And it is worse than naive for Americans to comfort themselves with the notion that the U.S. government will only torture “Islamo-fascists.” The administration’s Enemies List is far more expansive.

The deal is not yet carved into the statute book, so….

On the same topic - The American Conservative posted online today my review of John Yoo’s new book, War by Other Means. Here are some outtakes of the review:

George W. Bush has made absolutism respectable among American conservatives. And no one has done more pimping for president-as-Supreme-Leader than John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who helped create the “commander-in-chief override” doctrine, unleashing presidents from the confines of the law. At a time when Bush is pushing Congress to approve the use in military tribunals of confessions that resulted from torture, it is vital to understand the thinking of the Bush administration’s most visible advocate of “coercive interrogation.”

Yoo’s new book, War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror, reads like a slippery lawyer’s brief submitted to a dim judge who gets all his information from Fox News. Though Yoo’s misrepresentations and omissions should provoke outrage, his book will likely receive accolades from many conservative reviewers. This new volume compliments Yoo’s first book, The Powers of War and Peace, which revealed that the Founding Fathers intended to permit presidents to start wars on their own whims, regardless of what the Constitution says.

Perhaps Yoo’s authoritarian tendencies resulted from his time at Harvard, where empowering an elite is always in fashion. Yoo paints every proposal for limiting the president’s power as a dangerous novelty. He is always trying to shift the burden of proof onto anyone who thinks the president should not be a czar.
……
While curtsying to the prevailing rhetoric on democracy, Yoo shows contempt for “government by consent.” He claims the 2004 election vindicated Bush’s torture policy: “Our nation had a presidential and congressional election after Abu Ghraib and the leaking of the [2002] memos. If the people had disagreed with administration policies, they could have made a change.”

How could the people judge the policy when the Bush administration was suppressing almost all information about it? There were no independent probes into the torture scandal during 2004. All the investigators were under the thumb of the Pentagon. The investigations were designed to look only downward—with no authority to pursue wrongdoing to the highest branches of the Pentagon and the White House. The Bush team succeeded in delaying the vast majority of damning revelations until after he was re-elected. Presumably, the public can “approve” atrocities even when the government deceives them about the actual events.

Yoo reasons like a devious personal-injury lawyer—yet it is the rights of the American people that are being run over. He is being feted by conservative foundations and think tanks, and often treated deferentially by liberals, for a theory of presidential power that would make Hobbes proud.

Yoo believes Americans should presume that the government always has a good reason for violating the law, even when it deceives the citizens about the reasoning. Yoo’s doctrines are absolutely unfit for any system with a pretense of self-government.****

Comments/condemnations welcome at I am welcoming comments at http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/09/22/torture-the-law-of-the-land-and-the-torture-mastermind-reviewed/

 

The bloodthirsty “conservative” warmongers at National Review have now all but admitted that The War on Terror will never end. This is from the September 11th issue:

“Ladies and gentlemen: Our Problems are here, there, and everythere. They will last our lifetime. You have heard of the Thirty Years’ War. This is ours—if not our Hundred Years’ War.”