Antiwar.com Blog

Debbie Clark covering the court-martial for Antiwar.com from Fort Stewart, Georgia, reports that judge Col. Donna M. Wright has convicted Sgt. Kevin Benderman of the charge of missing movement,” failing to convict on the charge of desertion.

Updated: Judge Wright sentenced Sgt. Benderman to 15 months. Observers felt this was a harsher sentence than expected for the lesser charge. He also received a dishonorable discharge and a reduction in rank to E-1. This is believed to be the harshest sentence yet for an Iraq resister. Judge Wright threw out the bogus charge of larceny (for clerical error in receiving combat pay) earlier in the week.

Military police immediately took Sgt. Benderman into custody.

Read Debbie Clark’s earlier report on the court-martial.

We will update this report as details come in.

It’s funny the way I did my first podcast. The software had just come in, and I was experimenting with the editing function. A copy of The Double Axe, by Robinson Jeffers, was on my desk, by happenstance, and I picked it up: it seemed to me that poetry and podcasting sort of go together. At any rate, I turned at random to the "Suppressed Poems" section, which includes poems deleted by publisher Bennett Cerf from the original Random House edition. These poems were deemed far too politically incorrect to be published in postwar America: criticism of Franklin Roosevelt? Not allowed! At any rate, the suppressed poems were published in subsequent editions, and they are searing. I read three of them herein, with commentary.

I have written about Jeffers here, and so I’ll just note that Jeffers was the leading poet of the 1920s, a Taft Republican whose opposition to the war pervaded his later books, and led to his exile from the leftist-dominated Popular Front literary community, which fulsomely supported both the President and the war: they were the neocons of their day.

Jeffers is one of my favorite writers, not only for his poetic imagination and prose style but also on account of his politics, best expressed in his poem "Shine, Perishing Republic":

"While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother."

Read the whole thing….

Download the MP3 (for non-PodCast users)

In the aforementioned post by Glenn Reynolds about the contras and Antiwar.com (with bonus balderdash from Stephen Schwartz), Reynolds writes:

Yeah, the refrain’s a familiar one, since it’s always the same: Our guys are the bad guys, the only atrocities are by our guys, the murderous thugs our guys oppose are actually pure-minded agrarian reformers, and the U.S. is wrong and should get out. That’s the story from these guys every single time.

Reynolds didn’t link to the offending post by Justin Raimondo because, of course, NOTHING in it praised the Sandinistas or any other “pure-minded agrarian reformers.” In fact, Raimondo specifically dissed the Commies:

Che Guevara was a totalitarian thug, but I don’t recall hearing that ever did anything like cut off a woman’s breasts. And why, pray tell, must we choose between a dead Commie and a bunch of “ex”-fascists hustling t-shirts?

A quick search for the term “Sandinistas” on Antiwar.com turns up this first result. Some choice snippets (and by all means, go read the whole thing if you think I’m cherrypicking):

The Sandinistas were lionized on the Left, much as Fidel Castro and his ragged guerrilla army were upheld as the new symbols of a revolutionary generation in the heyday of the radicalized 1960s. The repression against domestic dissidents, Miskito Indians and trade unionists, was ignored by the Left or else rationalized as “revolutionary.” …

It is one thing to oppose whitewashing the crimes of the Sandinistas, and quite another to advocate aiding the so-called contras – the US-supported-and-subsidized armed force that was engaged in overthrowing them. Radosh explains his transition from a principled noninterventionist to an advocate of contra aid as follows:

“As a result of what I observed on the trip, I eventually became a firm supporter of contra aid. While congressional liberals were waging a campaign to cut off all such military aid, I had come to understand that it was only the threat of a fully capable contra army that made the Sandinista leaders even contemplate any internal loosening up.”

NO THIRD FORCE?
As to why such an army could not arise indigenously, and overthrow the Sandinistas without being turned into the sock puppet of the Americans, is a question that contra aid supporters could not answer then, and will not address today. For the answer is that there was, indeed, such an army, one led by Commandante Eden Pastora, the leader of the original army that overthrew the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. Pastora was a popular hero who sought to use his political weight to organize a third force, one committed to political pluralism that would be independent of both the US and Moscow. For his trouble he was targeted by the CIA and marked for assassination, barely escaping with his life to Costa Rica, where, today, he is a fisherman. But for Radosh, it was and is a black-and-white issue, the contras versus the Sandinistas, with no room for a third force.

That Reynolds is a pathological liar should surprise no one — it’s almost a prerequisite for his profession, which he might actually practice instead of teach if he were smart enough to ignore Suleyman Ahmad.

UPDATE: Oh, goody. Suleyman Ahmad resumes his creepy correspondence with me, hurling another revealing “insult” my way:

I know it hurts you, but you are ignored and I appear on TV and in print all the time.

Hey, Suleyman, how’s the lawsuit coming? You could be on Fox News AND Court TV!

Tuesday at 5pm eastern time, I will be filling in on the boss’s show, and talking with former CIA man Philip Giraldi about this curious bit he wrote in the American Conservative (not online) among other things:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing–that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack–but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

Thanks to Justin Logan.

Update: Show’s over. To listen to the interview, click here, to download mp3, click here
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His High-and-Mightiness, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame, was soooo pissed off that I blogged his endorsement of contra terrorism that he gave a free blog ad to “Contra Cafe,” an outfit selling coffee, t-shirts, and perhaps old atrocity pictures now that these former Somocistas are out of the assassination and drug-dealing business:

“Yes, that’s a blogad for Contra Café over on the right. But they didn’t buy it in response to my post — I gave ’em a freebie after seeing the folks at antiwar.com go crazy over my earlier mention of them. I should’ve held out for a free t-shirt, at least.”

Naturally Reynolds doesn’t provide a link to our critique of his contra-enthusiasm — that might expose his readers to our eeeeeeeeeeevil thoughts. Just like his contra friends, who tortured women and sneaked around blowing up cooperatives and assassinating their political enemies — sound familiar? — Reynolds has the moral sensibilities of the administration hacks he defends — many of whom, not coincidentally, were active during the 1980s pushing the contra cause.

This guy is a big pro-war blogger and a vocal advocate of “spreading democracy and freedom” to Iraq.

Search me

: I say it’s a good thing that New York police will start random bag searches on the subways.

Oh, I know it will be inconvenient when I’m late for a meeting and it’s 120-degrees down there and I fear there will be a line. Nonetheless, if and when the cops search me, I’ll thank them.

This morning on Today, they rolled out the “privacy” boogeyman. “Privacy advocates” were expressing concern. Who the hell are these “privacy advocates?” Name two. But listening to reporters, they seem to be everywhere. You just don’t know it. Because they’re very private.

And what precisely is the privacy problem? If the cops catch you carrying something illegal, well, you shouldn’t be carrying anything illegal. If they catch you carrying the latest Playboy — or, more embarrassing, Radar — then don’t worry; they’ve seen worse.

Are random screenings going to catch the next terrorist ready to kill people? We’ll never know. But it is worth the effort.

Elsewhere, bloviating on about how “we” can’t allow the mullahs to come to power in Iraq (this was before the mullahs came to power in Iraq), this same guy says, “And you cannot convince me that any people will willingly choose tyranny.”