Antiwar.com Blog

Or so says the lead editorial from Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

”Since the Treasury story broke, as it happens, no one but Congressman Ed Markey and a few cranks have even objected to the program, much less claimed illegality.”

That’s funny, I could have sworn it was the Wall Street Journal who did the most to expose and oppose Bill Clinton’s “Know Your Customer” big brother spying in 1998.

I guess time flies when you’re boot-licking fascists.

James Bovard, the author of the great new book Attention Deficit Democracy, who last week went on MSNBC and FOX “News” to defend the press for telling the truth about this subject and remind viewers that this government lies about everything, including torture, NSA phone taps, records etc., remarked:

“I look forward to the Journal editorial page’s updates on this subject as news leaks out about how this surveillance program ran amok.”

Don’t hold your breath, Jim.

I admit to being a crank, but this bank records search is obviously illegal on its face. The whole process is based around bogus “administrative subpoenas” – where one cop asks another cop for a warrant instead of a judge as required (no-exceptions) by the fourth amendment to the US Constitution:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The recent attacks on the New York Times for publishing this information have been nothing short of incredible. The Times is the establishment news organ in this country. If the GOP can actually get over on them, they can get over on anyone.

It was Bovard who pointed me to this quote from some dipshit Republican congressman named Ted Poe, a short speech entitled “Benedict Arnold Press?” given on the House floor June 28th. [Note: Thomas.gov does not allow permanent hyperlinks, but if you go to this page and search for “Benedict” it should come right up.]

“Mr. Speaker, we are fighting a war on terror, and now we are being told we are battling the press as well. The United States has rooted out terror on a global scale. They have also gotten unprecedented help from other countries and international banking institutions to seek out accounts used for al Qaeda money laundering, because without a supply of money, the terrorists have no fuse to light.

“Now the New York Times has apparently detailed that security program to the entire world, and we find ourselves pondering what to do when the press willingly reveals national security secrets to terrorists.

“Prior to World War II, the United States had broken the Japanese military communications codes. A journalist published a book revealing this classified information, so right before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese changed their codes so the United States was unaware of this invasion.

“In 1950, a law was passed making releasing such classified information a crime. If the New York Times has violated this law by becoming the Benedict Arnold press, they need to be held accountable. Not even a journalist from the Times has the right to violate the law just to get a byline.

“And that’s just the way it is.”

Wrong.

First of all, I’m no expert on whatever law he’s citing from the fifties, but if it restricts speech in the way the congressman claims, it is plainly unconstitutional:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

To be fair, he’s wrong about everything else, so who knows?

Secondly, Bovard said he’d never heard of a book published prior to World War II which compromised American intelligence on Japan. Neither had I.

So I sent an email to Robert B. Stinnett, a former radio guest of mine and historian on the particular issue of America’s ability to crack World War II era Japanese codes.

Stinnett is the World War II veteran who proved for all time in his 1999 book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor and cut the commanders out of the chain of intelligence so that they would be caught unaware and the administration could to get the previously unwilling American people into the war in Europe.

Stinnett responded:

“The quote outlined in red in your E-mail [Poe’s Pearl Harbor bit] does not make any sense. I am not aware that any journalist either in book form of newspaper form revealed – prior to Pearl Harbor – that the USN broke the Japanese military codes. Further, I am not aware there was a Japanese military invasion of Pearl Harbor. [Ha! -editor]

“The Japanese Navy did make a routine change to their naval operational code on December 4, 1941. I am not aware the code change was ever reported by any news media prior to Pearl Harbor or during World War II.”

I half expect the Ministry of Truth to go back and manufacture the “proof” at this point.

The rest of Poe’s little speech is just as twisted:

“Mr. Speaker, we are fighting a war on terror, and now we are being told we are battling the press as well.”

We are most definitely not fighting a “War on Terror.” “We” are fighting two wars of occupation, and creating more terrorists while we do it. Any legitimacy the Afghan mission may have once had is long-since expired – since, say, around the time Bush let Osama escape from Tora Bora.

There was no jihadi terrorism in Iraq until we invaded. The vast majority of self described mujahideen would rather fight their local governments, “the near enemy,” than take on the US. The invasion has only helped them to split the difference in their argument with bin Laden and Zawahiri as they kill “near Americans” and to recruit a new generation into their ranks.

The fact that “we are being told that we are battling the press as well,” is only instructive in that it helps us to understand just how much the government hates our freedom.

Every anti-American jihadi type on earth assumes that the US is attempting to tap his phone, follow his money trail etc.

It is Americans who are the victims of these abuses, not terrorists. The Times was informing the people of this land, whose rights are being continuously violated by their so-called servants, what these impostors are really up to. It’s about time they did something besides lie us into war.

These clowns in congress seem to be trying their best to make us prefer an imperial president to their lousy rule. Try to resist.

Excerpts from “Roads to somewhere,” The Economist

…[H]ighways began expanding rapidly after President Dwight Eisenhower, 50 years ago this month, signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 which committed the government to invest heavily in a national network of interstates.

…[T]he network that he authorised was often referred to as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The generals thought that better roads would make it easier to move military convoys around in case of attack, as well as to evacuate big cities in a hurry. The overpasses were made high enough so that ballistic missiles could be transported beneath them. Though the atom bombs and invaders never came, life in America would never again be the same.

The interstates replaced social interaction and serendipity with speed and efficiency, and some have lamented the change ever since. By 1962 John Steinbeck was writing about the disappearance of antique stores, factory outlets and “roadside stands selling squash juice.” He complained that the new roads would make it “possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”

The interstates paved the way for fast food chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which set up shop near the access ramps. Besides changing the way that motorists eat, the new highways also transformed the ways in which companies moved their goods. One reason that Wal-Mart became a cost-cutting behemoth was because it exploited the logistical advantages of the new system faster than its competitors did.

Besides linking distant places to each other, the system has encircled many urban areas with “beltways,” which let motorists move between surrounding suburbs without having to bother with the cities. Once commuters began whizzing (on a good day) around those beltways, centrifugal force did the rest, propelling office space, staff and tax revenues away from the centre.

The big question now is whether Americans are willing to keep spending more than $80 billion a year of their tax money to maintain and upgrade the system. Clifford Winston, at the Brookings Institution, has tried to measure the benefits reaped from improved logistics. Although this is clearly an imprecise exercise, he reckons that government-financed highway investments have run into steeply diminishing returns since the 1980s.

…[D]rivers are also taxpayers and voters. And growing numbers of them are turned off by the corruption that goes with pork-barrel spending. Highway bills are a notorious source of rancid pork.

Some state governments — which face tighter fiscal constraints than the federal one — are toying with ideas for letting the private sector take over stretches of highway. Now that the interstate network is built, the challenge is to maintain it. For $3.8 billion, Indiana agreed this year to lease its toll road, which is part of I-80 and I-90, to an Australian-Spanish consortium for the next 75 years. The consortium will maintain the highway and keep the tolls; and it will no doubt face public pressure to do a good job. But it will not be selling squash juice from roadside stalls.

~ Sam

Christopher Hitchens’ pathetic decline picks up speed. (By the way, this recent cry for attention aided Eros about as much as Hitchens’ following non sequiturs should help Ares.)

[M]ay I propose some ways in which those who don’t want to be associated with Michael Moore, George Galloway, Ramsey Clark, and the rest of the Zarqawi and Saddam apologists can make themselves plain? Here are four headings under which the anti-war types could disprove the charge of bad faith.

I wonder how much more of this Slate is going to publish before shame forces them to hire a more credible resident warmonger – maybe Sean Hannity. Aside from the obvious Stalinism of demanding that the accused “disprove the charge” against them, who the hell is Hitchens to talk about “bad faith”? Has there been a single lie about Iraq over the last four years that he has not repeated, embellished, and amplified?

Anyway, the first way we “anti-war types” can earn a pat on the head from Hitch is to renounce our love of land mines. You see, “we have persuasive evidence” (no elaboration or link) “that Iran and Syria have contributed some sophisticated explosives” to the Iraqi insurgency, so one’s failure to call for regime change in those two countries makes one objectively pro-land-mine.

Next comes some riff about prewar “human shields,” who I think made up a whopping .0001% of war opponents, and ends as follows:

[W]ould not now be the ideal time for those who hate war to go to Iraq and stand outside the mosques, hospitals, schools, and women’s centers that are daily subjected to murderous assaults? This would write an imperishable page in the history of American dissent.

Imperishable! Ha! See, because they would perish. Oh, that British sense of humor. But, um, would not now be the ideal time for those who turned Iraq into a terrorist sh*thole to go be human shields? Would not now be the ideal time for, say, famous pro-war alcoholics to go stand in front of Baghdad’s rapidly disappearing liquor stores and take a car-bomb blast for the team?

Third:

Couldn’t you say at least something about the sanctions? While the Baath Party was still in power, I would receive appeals every week about the number of children who were dying because of the embargo. I think the figures were inflated to some extent, but there is no doubt that a huge and very distressing statistic concerning the death and malnourishment and health crisis of the poorer Iraqis had been uncovered. Well, I tried to point out that the best way of lifting the sanctions (which the grossly obese Iraqi ruling party was manipulating for profit and corruption) was to remove the regime that had made the embargo necessary in the first place and that was stealing baby formula and medicine for its own ends. I didn’t exactly get a standing ovation for the idea and suddenly was told that sanctions were actually a good idea since they kept Saddam “in his box” and thus obviated the need for his removal. But again, if civilian casualties are the question, is it not true that the end of U.N. sanctions has been a positive and humanitarian thing by definition?

Yes, in the same way that the end of a prisoner’s life of degradation is “a positive and humanitarian thing by definition.” Even if it comes via the electric chair.

Number four is so ridiculously red a herring that I cannot imagine anyone else – not even the dimmest b/mimbo on Fox & Friends – throwing it in the faces of the Big Bad Antiwar Left:

Isn’t it time to revive the demand that homosexuals be allowed to wear the uniform of the U.S. military?

Oh yeah? Well, ’twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, bitch.

In an odd turnabout, some Democratic “antiwar” politicians are explaining their vote against the recent “stay the course” resolution passed by Congress on the grounds that it means supporting amnesty for insurgents. “I support our troops and goals in Iraq,” says Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford, Jr., currently a congressman and a candidate for U.S. Senate, “but I will not support a resolution praising a government that wants to grant amnesty to terrorists fighting our troops. There is only one option for such people: we should hunt them down and punish them. Amnesty is not an option.” Senators Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) – the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat — agree.

If Nixon had followed this policy during the Vietnam war, we would never have negotiated with the Vietnamese and extricated ourselves from that quagmire. And what if the Iraqis resolve to “hunt down and punish” any and all American troops responsible for the killing of Iraqi civilians?

UPDATE: I see that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has backed down from his offer of amnesty, doubtless in response to the political reaction in the U.S. So much for the vaunted “independence” of the Iraqi government, which is, in reality, a collection of American sock-puppets. And so much for the prospects of a negotiated settlement for this seemingly endless, futile war.

Scott P. Richert has more on the WMD non-story, and why Sen. Santorum may be so hot for it. Arthur Silber writes to remind me that the WMD matter is largely irrelevant, and I agree, but it’s always good to remind people how dishonest – and ridiculously so – the warbots are.

The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy held a forum on Wednesday: “The Right Against War with Iran.”

Videos of the event speakers are now available on The Free Liberal website. The speakers included:

• Ivan Eland
  Independent Institute, Antiwar.com Columnist
  “The United States Might Have to Accept a Nuclear Iran”
• Philip Giraldi
  Former CIA officer, partner in Cannistraro Associates
  “Iran: Same Bad Intelligence, Same Catastrophic Results”
• Doug Bandow
  Liberty Coalition and Antiwar.com columnist
  “Another War: Another Attack on Civil Liberties”
• Charles Peña
  Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy and Antiwar.com columnist
  “Refocusing the War on Terrorism”