Antiwar.com Blog

Jesse Walker finds a Glenn Reynolds statement from 1999 that could easily appear on Antiwar.com:

[O]ur current situation – with so many foreign troop deployments that even military buffs can’t keep track of them all and with wars initiated essentially on presidential whim – would have horrified the Framers.

Reynolds huffs and puffs, but Walker could have quoted more. Here’s the passage above in broader context (scroll down):

During the 18th and 19th centuries, militia forces proved quite effective at their primary purpose: defense of local terrain against invasion and insurrection. (Militia-like forces are still good at this, even against professional soldiers, as the U.S. experience in Lebanon and Somalia illustrates.)

When it comes to projecting power abroad, militias aren’t as good. Part-time soldiers are less willing to go on such missions, and, as Temm rightly notes, preparation for such work requires more and different training than does the defense of familiar terrain. To the Framers, who feared not only standing armies but also the imperial ambitions they would bring, this unsuitability for foreign missions was not a flaw but a feature: A militia-based defense strategy was far less likely to produce foreign entanglements and wars. As Gary Hart correctly points out in the book I reviewed, our current situation – with so many foreign troop deployments that even military buffs can’t keep track of them all and with wars initiated essentially on presidential whim – would have horrified the Framers. A professional army is better suited to our current situation, but the militia system was meant to keep us out of the situation altogether.

For even more eye-openers, read Reynolds’ glowing review of Gary Hart’s The Minuteman: Restoring an Army of the People. Dig this:

Hart opens by noting that our current military posture could be described as “Eisenhower’s Nightmare”: a military-industrial complex so politically and economically powerful that it has taken on a life of its own. It is Eisenhower’s nightmare because the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about was a creature of the Cold War, but its present-day version has survived the end of that struggle almost intact. Despite the oddity of a huge military establishment with no plausible superpower foes, this fact is rarely remarked upon. That is because almost everyone in a position to care, from members of Congress fighting military base closings to flak-jacketed journalists addicted to covering war zones, has an investment in keeping the money flowing. As Hart says, “this great machine grinds grimly, ineluctably onward, searching for villains, whether stone-throwing tribesmen or desert quacks, to justify its existence.” (Compare this with what Framing-era writer Joel Barlow said about standing armies: “Thus money is required to levy armies, and armies to levy money; and foreign wars are introduced as the pretended occupation for both.”) …

Hart’s book is well-written and thoroughly anchored in both military and political realities. An America that followed his recommendations would probably be less apt to become involved in ill-considered foreign wars, more resistant to tyranny, and effectively impossible to invade. This prospect is reason enough to begin the national debate that Hart calls for. Whether that debate takes place will be an interesting test of whether Eisenhower’s nightmare is coming to an end.

Wow, you’d almost get the impression that imperialism and the military-industrial complex are bad things…

UPDATE: Corrected wrong link on “broader context.”

Antiwar.com columnist Charles Peña will be at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University tomorrow to launch his new book, Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism. Details are available here.

Has there been a single terrorism case post-9/11 that wasn’t a complete farce?

Remember the scary paintball terrorists? (innocent – convicted anyway)

How about the falsely convicted and later released in the Detroit Case? You know, the one where the prosecutor is now being prosecuted?

Wow, we sure felt like we needed government the week they were arrested, huh?

There was the “worst of the worst” in the form of Mr. Hamdi, who was set free by the military after the court said he was eligible for a writ of habeus corpus.

You may not have heard of Ali al-Timimi. He was convicted of talking, and was sentenced to life +70.

Remember the “sleeper cell” in Buffalo? “Plead guilty or we’ll turn you over to Don ‘personally involved in torture‘ Rumsfeld.”

That poor lawyer in the Spanish train bombing case who “fingerprints matched”? He’d have gone to the chair if Spanish authorities hadn’t proven his innocence.

Then there’s Abu Ali, who was tortured by the Saudis into “admitting” that he planned to kill Bush. The judge said evidence gained under foreign torture was perfectly acceptable, evidence that he was tortured was not. He’s doing 30 years.

Don’t forget Jose Padilla, who Paul “Liar” Wolfowitz finally admitted was innocent of the accusation – fittingly announced by former Attorney General John Ashcroft from Moscow – that he was going to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb,” and blow up apartment buildings.

After 3 years in a Navy brig as an “enemy combatant,” this American citizen arrested on American soil was finally turned over to the court system before the USSC could get a hold of his case.

Now, we arrive at the trial of the “terrorist sleeper cell” in Lodi California. Turns out, the people of that town – who were as frightened of terrorists as they had once been of Saddam’s nukes after the arrest with great fanfare last summer – were absolute fools to fear their neighbors for a single minute.

Funny thing is that if the federal infomant hadn’t so obviously perjured himself on the stand, this father and son would surely have been kidnapped and locked away for many years. They may yet – the jury deliberates…

From Knight-Ridder:

“The government introduced no evidence that Hayat plotted any specific terrorist acts. Other than Hayat’s own disputed admissions, prosecutors produced no evidence that he actually received any training.

“The government’s case relies largely on the testimony of its star witness, a convenience-store manager who received $230,000 in FBI payments for infiltrating the Lodi mosque to target its conservative clerics. The informant, Naseem Khan, stunned the court when he testified that he had seen Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, at the Lodi mosque in 1999.”

From the AP:

“Defense attorneys and terrorism experts said it was highly unlikely they would have been in the United States, a point prosecutors conceded later in the trial.”

It’s high time that all law enforcement powers over the citizen in this country are returned to the state governments and county courts.

The leadership of the US Department of Justice have proven themselves nothing but liars and murderers.

And don’t give me Moussoui, they could’ve stopped the attack in the first place if they’d listened to the agents in Minnesota.

Discussion over at Stress.

Update: The stupid jury convicted the kid.

The wimp still won’t link to Antiwar.com, but today he offers an etiology of Dubya’s youthful delinquency – and, apparently, his adult worldview. Under the heading “Bush Insulter Dies,” James Taranto relates the following story about recently deceased Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. (from a 1999 Washington Post article):

When George W. Bush arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1964, his father was in the closing days of his first political race. Running against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat, he was the beneficiary of the largest Republican turnout in Texas history that November, but it was not enough. Riding the coattails of his fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Yarborough defeated his Republican challenger by 300,000 votes.

Not long afterward, Bush decided to look up someone has father had told him he should go see, one of his contemporaries, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain later famous for his anti-war activities.

The greeting he received was hardly what he expected. “I knew your father,” Bush remembers Coffin saying, “and your father lost to a better man.”

Coffin says he has no recollection of his conversation with Bush and says if it happened, he was making a joke. But for Bush it was a jarring signal that Yale was going to be different, a place where he might not effortlessly fit in, where his father’s values were not universally admired.

“You talk about a shattering blow,” said Barbara Bush in a recent interview. “Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I’m not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel].”

Oh, yes, a shattering blow, one many of Dubya’s contemporaries must be glad they never had to face. The whole world doesn’t adore Daddy? Keep ’em coming, barkeep!

Taranto sighs this deep sociological insight re: liberal academics:

One wonders if it ever dawns on these people what effective recruiters they are for the political right.

Hey, hippies, we remember how you treated us in college – now we have nukes. Our asses ain’t gonna kiss themselves!

Two great interviews of Seymour Hersh regarding his new article “The Iran Plans,” about the “consideration” by the Air Force and White House of the use of nuclear weapons against Iran’s empty Natanz facility.

Crooks and Liars has the video of Hersh on Wolf Blitzer’s show.

Amy Goodman also interviewed him on Democracy Now this morning. This is a Must See/Hear/Read. Who knew Iran’s government had offered to recognise Israel?!