Leonard Clark, who is currently serving as a member of the 860th MP Company of the Arizona National Guard patrolling the streets of Baghdad, has been arrested. Clark is a vocal opponent of the Iraq war, and this is clearly retaliation for expressing his views. Here’s the text of an e-mail from one of his fellow soldiers:
“I’ve just learned today that Leonard Clark was arrested for campaigning for the Senate! Well, it looks as if they could not muzzle him according to military law (the attorney said he had a right to speak his opinion), so they found another excuse! Apparently they can arrest him for campaigning for office. There’s just one thing wrong with that—Leonard Clark had not actually campaigned in the sense that we recognize campaigning (raising funds, soliciting campaign workers, etc.) All he has said is that he opposes the reasons for being in Iraq because he is there to see the truth and that he hopes he makes it back so he can run against Kyl. This is NOT in my view an actual campaign at this point. His papers have not even yet been filed! So how can he be accused of campaigning and arrested under this outrageous pretext? This is so shameful we should all be furious enough to write to as many government officials as we feel can help and copy as much media as possible!”
The next time some neocon fool writes me and says: “Our troops in Iraq are fighting so that morons like you can express your traitorous views” I’m going to refer them to Guardsman Clark.
This is a perfect story for the supposedly “liberal” media — so where the heck are they?
Support our troops — free Leonard Clark!
UPDATE: One of the great things about this blog is that I get responses from my readers pretty quickly, sometimes minutes after posting. Here’s one:
“I first learned about Leonard Clark’s arrest listening to Thom Hartmann’s radio program today and then googled and located your posting.
I called my Congresswoman (Zoe Lofgren) and 2 Senators (Boxer and Feinstein) and asked that they look into this outrage. The people that I spoke with were not aware of Clark nor his arrest. Lofgren’s office sounded intent on following up and I believe Boxer’s office will as well. As usual, I hold out no hope that Feinstein will do the right thing. Also, I called the San Jose Mercury News and left a voice mail message for the national news desk with a plea that the paper investigate and cover the story.”
Ok, folks, let’s follow this reader’s good example and get on those phones! What’s up with arrest Leonard Clark?
Andrew Sullivan, who has accused the antiwar movement of being a “fifth column,” is hallucinating again: he accuses me of “peddling” the story that “the Jews knew about the London bombings in advance” — a brazen lie, as anyone who reads my column can see for themselves. (Sullivan, the supposed Uber-Blogger, doesn’t even give the correct link to it. Typical.)
Let’s clear this up right here and now: Israeli intelligence is not “the Jews.” Indeed, there is no such collective entity as “the Jews.” There is, however, a nation called Israel, with a very efficient intelligence service that makes it its business to know what the jihadists are up to. What is so blatantly dishonest about Sullivan’s smear, however, is that he nowhere refers to the basis of my speculation that the Israelis may have known about the bombings in advance: an Associated Press news story that says:
“British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday’s explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city, a senior Israeli official said.
Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had planned to attend an economic conference in a hotel over the subway stop where one of the blasts occurred, and the warning prompted him to stay in his hotel room instead, government officials said.
“… Just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say they had received warnings of possible attacks, the official said. He did not say whether British police made any link to the economic conference. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the nature of his position.”
Stratfor.com offers this analysis:
“Contrary to original claims that Israel was warned ‘minutes before’ the first attack, unconfirmed rumors in intelligence circles indicate that the Israeli government actually warned London of the attacks “a couple of days” previous. Israel has apparently given other warnings about possible attacks that turned out to be aborted operations. The British government did not want to disrupt the G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, or call off visits by foreign dignitaries to London, hoping this would be another false alarm.”
And finally, here’s Tommy Preston, of Preston Global, a 40-year veteran of intelligence work, who says that it wasn’t the Brits who warned Netanyahu, but the Israeli Embassy:
“Terrorism expert Tommy Preston of Preston Global in Frankfort, Kentucky, said sources in the intelligence community reported that at least one person in London, England was warned of Thursday morning’s terrorist attacks moments before the initial blast. Preston, citing sources in the intelligence community, said former Israeli Prime Minister and current Finance Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was in London this morning for an economic forum. ‘Just before the first blast, Netanyahu got a call from the Israeli Embassy telling him to stay in his hotel room. The hotel is located next to the subway station where the first attack occurred and he did stay put and shortly after that, there was the explosion,’ Preston said.”
Sullivan, who’s been smearing me and Antiwar.com for years, doesn’t care one whit about evidence. He poses as a reasonable right-winger, but when it comes to defending Israel no matter what, he stands alongside Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the born-again dispensationalist nutballs who believe that Israel can do no wrong.
Sullivan also gets in a tizzy because the heroic Paul Craig Roberts calls Tony Blair a war criminal. Oh yeah, that’s really really outrageous — so outrageous that the British government was scared shitless that their illegal war would indeed make them liable for war crimes, as internal documents show. So get your head out of your ass, Sullivan, and quit lying. And what’s even more ridiculous: he throws me — an openly gay man — in with FRED PHELPS, the Baptist “minister” who goes around holding demonstrations with his tiny clique of followers who carry signs saying “God Hates Fags.” Oh yeah, and I’m also supposedly somehow associated with Charles Colson — who has more in common with laptop bombardier Sullivan, and certainly zero in common with me. What is Sullivan smoking?
As I said in this column the other day:
“The War Party is getting desperate. Unhinged by the complete collapse of public support, and hounded by those who insist on recalling the rosy scenarios predicted by advocates of “democratizing” Iraq by force – they were supposed to shower us with rose petals, it was going to be a “cake walk,” remember? – they are flailing about, lashing out at their enemies with the weapon of last resort – brazen smears, backed up by nothing but arbitrary assertions and Stalinesque rhetoric. You’re bound to see an increase in this as the War Party is further discredited and some of them even face a few, uh, legal problems. Their hysteria is a prelude to their final disintegration, and, as such, it is a good sign. Until they are finally and totally defeated, however, we can only be sure of one thing: it’s going to get a lot uglier.”
Sullivan is a pompous has-been who’s too smart to not know what he’s doing. He concludes his smear-job with this:
“I see little to distinguish these people from the Democratic Underground types. Except that the mainstream right is too squeamish sometimes in condemning them. Ever seen one of these guys ripped up on O’Reilly? Thought not.”
Please, please, please — put me on O’Reilly! With Sullivan, preferably. With one or both hands tied behind my back …
NOTE: I edited the ending of this entry and deleted some particularly harsh (even for me) rhetoric, because my good friend Arthur Silber made an excellent point: it detracts from the message. I wouldn’t want to sink the level of my enemies.
It looks like the London drama is not over:
“Police ordered the evacuation of the entertainment district in central Birmingham late Saturday because of intelligence suggesting a security threat. Police initially restricted road traffic into the city center, but then ordered an evacuation after receiving further intelligence, a police spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity.”
The BBC reports “there have also been reports of controlled explosions by police.” Initially, pubs and restaurants were being searched, and motorists were told not to come into the city center: now, it’s evacuation time ….
What’s up? Stay tuned …
London’s Terror Thursday has brought home to me, with renewed vigor, the utter monstrousness of what we are up against — a worldwide criminal conspiracy of jihadists objectively working in perfect tandem with Western governments whose foreign policy of perpetual war seems designed to bolster the terrorist cause and give them every reason to expect success. As the news of the London bombings greeted me on Thursday morning, like some waking nightmare, I couldn’t help but recall the opening lines of Michael Scheuer’s Imperial Hubris:
“As I complete this book, U.S., British, and other coalition forces are trying to govern apparently ungovernable postwar states in Afghanistan and Iraq, while simultaneously fighting growing Islamist insurgencies in each – a state of affairs our leaders call victory. In conducting these activities, and the conventional military campaigns preceding them, U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.”
I would not be at all surprised if the same terrorist networks that are currently operating in Iraq are responsible for the London blasts, as this report alleges. In Afghanistan, during the anti-Soviet jihad, we created a Frankenstein monster in the form of Al Qaeda, which came back to haunt us — and now we are creating for it a twin in Iraq.
Saturday (4-6 eastern time) on the Weekend Interview Show, I’ll be talking with Paul Craig Roberts about the causes of the London bombings, and their consequenses for the government’s terror war.
In the second hour Nat Hentoff will be on to discuss the effect of all this violence on our liberty, particularly Patriot act expansions and the CIA’s kidnapping squads.
Update: Show’s over, archives here
