Wednesday 23rd July 2008
Daniel Ellsberg’s Lessons for Our Time
10:53 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 0
The Future of Freedom Foundation posted online today an article of mine from the May issue of Freedom Daily. Without further adieu….
ELLSBERG’S LESSONS FOR OUR TIME
by James Bovard
Daniel Ellsberg is the kind of American who should receive a Medal of Freedom. Except that the Medals of Freedom are distributed by presidents who routinely give them to “useful idiots” and apologists for their wars and power grabs. It should be renamed the Medal for Enabling or Applauding Official Crimes in the Name of Freedom.
Ellsberg knowingly risked spending a life in prison to bring the truth about the Vietnam War to Americans. He had hoped truth would set Americans free from the spell of official lies. But the experience in Iraq indicates that Americans have learned little if anything from the Vietnam-era deceits.
Flora Lewis, a New York Times columnist, writing three weeks before 9/11, commented in a review of a book on U.S. government lies on the Vietnam War, “There will probably never be a return to the discretion, really collusion, with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well.” But within months of her comment, the media had proven itself as craven as ever.
The following year, Ellsberg’s book — Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers — came out. I should have read this book before writing the “Lying and Legitimacy” chapter in Attention Deficit Democracy. Ellsberg’s bitter experiences would have curbed my youthful idealism. His book hit the streets at a time when Americans were still inclined to see Bush through a 9/11 holy haze. His lies on Iraq were not widely recognized until after Baghdad had fallen and the WMDs failed to materialize.
Ellsberg tells the story of how, as a former Marine lieutenant with a doctorate from Harvard, he was hired by John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense, and started work in August 1964 on the day the Gulf of Tonkin crisis ignited. He relates receiving the “flash” wire dispatches from the USS Maddox.
Within hours after the U.S. destroyer reported being attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats, the ship’s commander had wired Washington that the reports of an attack on his ship may have been wildly exaggerated: “Entire action leaves many doubts.”
But it didn’t matter, because this was just the pretext that Lyndon Johnson was looking for. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara raced to proclaim that the attack was unprovoked. But at a National Security Council meeting on the evening that the first report came in, Johnson asked, “Do they want war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?” CIA chief John McCone answered, “No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attack on their off-shore islands. They are responding out of pride and on the basis of defense considerations.”
The fact was that the United States had orchestrated an attack by South Vietnamese commandos on North Vietnamese territory before the alleged conflict began. But Johnson lied and commenced bombing, and Congress rushed to cheer him on.
In Vietnam, as in Iraq, the U.S. government pushed hard to get an election to sanctify its puppet regime. Ellsberg, who spent two years in Vietnam after his time in the Pentagon, aided some of the key U.S. officials in this effort who sought an honest vote. But when U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge heard their pitch, he replied, “You’ve got a gentleman in the White House right now [Johnson] who has spent most of his life rigging elections. I’ve spent most of my life rigging elections. I spent nine whole months rigging a Republican convention to choose Ike as a candidate rather than Bob Taft.” Lodge later ordered, “Get it across to the press that they shouldn’t apply higher standards here in Vietnam than they do in the U.S.”
But Lodge’s comments were downright uplifting compared with a meeting that Ellsberg attended with former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was visiting Vietnam on a “fact-finding mission” to help bolster his presidential aspirations. Former CIA operative Edward Lansdale told Nixon that he and his colleagues wanted to help “make this the most honest election that’s ever been held in Vietnam.” Nixon replied, “Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right … so long as you win!” With the last words he did three things in quick succession: winked, drove his elbow hard into Lansdale’s arm, and slapped his own knee.
It’s hard to imagine any U.S. government official even suggesting to Bush, in his fly-bys at Camp Cupcake in Iraq, that the United States should make sure that the Iraqi elections were fair and square.
Ellsberg’s memoirs vividly explain how top officials are corrupted by possession of what they consider to be top-secret information. Ellsberg warned Henry Kissinger shortly after Nixon’s 1968 election victory that having access to classified information is “something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island, which turned them into swine.”
This is the one message of the book that no longer seems relevant, since there haven’t been any swine in the White House or Pentagon for a long time.
The Pentagon Papers
In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the war had gone wrong. The resulting study contained 47 volumes of material exposing the intellectual and political follies that had, by that time, already left tens of thousands of Americans dead. After the study was finished, it was distributed to the key players and federal agencies. However, the massive study was completely ignored. At the time the New York Times began publishing excerpts in 1971, “the White House and the State Department were unable even to locate the 47 volumes.” New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented at the time that “the people who read these documents in the Times were the first to study them.”
Ellsberg helped write a portion of the papers dealing with the Kennedy administration. He was struck by the incorrigibility of U.S. policy. No matter how many Ivy League grads and whiz kids were at the helm, “There was a general failure to study history or to analyze or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes. Above all, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing “progress” rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need for change in approach or for learning.”
The same failures permeate the U.S. military’s experience in Iraq. The Pentagon and White House have concocted one bogus standard after another to sanctify whatever recent policy change they announced.
Ellsberg was a gung-ho liberal Cold Warrior until the late 1960s. As he read the confidential documents that formed the basis of the Pentagon Papers, he realized that he had greatly underestimated the amount of perennial presidential deceit in America. He grasped that
the concentration of power within the executive branch since World War II had focused nearly all responsibility for policy “failure” upon one man, the president. At the same time, it gave him enormous capability to avert or postpone or conceal such personal failure by means of force or fraud. Confronted by resolute external resistance, as in Vietnam, that power could not fail to corrupt the human who held it.
Ellsberg became active with anti-war demonstrators and has great anecdotes of idiot cops at D.C. protests. The motto of the 1971 May Day anti-war protests was “If they won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” This is an ideal that should not be forgotten by those in our time who have wearied of surge and postsurge nonsense.
Publishing the Papers
I was surprised to learn how hard Ellsberg had to struggle to find anyone with the gumption to go public with the 7,000 pages. Sen. George McGovern at first was interested but ducked out on putting the Papers in the Congressional Record, as did Sen. William Fulbright. On the other hand, Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska had no fear and pulled out all the stops to get the information out.
The New York Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers was the big breakthrough. Nixon’s Justice Department raced to get an injunction blocking publication, and later did the same when the Washington Post began publishing material Ellsberg sent it. Ellsberg responded by sending chunks of his report to newspapers around the country. The Nixon administration’s rage and machinations were the best PR the Pentagon Papers could have received.
Nixon henchman H.R. Haldeman said to Nixon on the day the Papers first hit the New York Times that the result would be that “the ordinary guy” comes to believe that “you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgement. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this.”
Unfortunately, Haldeman’s fear was not borne out. Ellsberg was disappointed at the response to the Pentagon Papers: “There remained enormous resistance in the minds of voters and commentators to believing that these generalizations applied to an incumbent president.” This has been a perennial pitfall for American democracy: assuming that the most recently elected politician is an entirely different species from all the rascals who preceded him. It was especially ironic that so many Americans were so slow to recognize Nixon’s treachery.
At the start of his trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg declared, “This has been for me an act of hope and of trust. Hope that the truth will free us of this war. Trust that informed Americans will direct their public servants to stop lying and to stop the killing and dying by Americans in Indochina.”
This was the type of idealism that spurred Henry Kissinger to label Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.”
In the new century, Ellsberg has continued speaking out, condemning official lies, and appealing to Americans to recognize that wars are far bloodier and more costly than leaders claim. In July 2006, he warned that if the United States attacks Iran, “I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country.” He has publicly urged other Pentagon and administration insiders to take the risk to leak key documents in order to serve truth instead of the current regime.
Unfortunately, even when government officials risk their freedom and careers to leak information, the media sometimes refuse to publish it — or they bury it until after an election — as the New York Times did with its information on Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls.
Who knows how many other leaks have never seen the light of day because of a media that kowtowed to President Bush and Vice President Cheney as if they were gods?
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, 2006) as well as The Bush Betrayal (Palgrave, 2004), Lost Rights (St. Martin’s, 1994), and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003)
Thursday 10th July 2008
FISA Bashing on Antiwar.com Radio
9:01 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 3
Scott Horton of Antiwar.com RADIO and I chatted about FISA and other obscenities on Tuesday. The MP3 is now online and accessible here.
Scott came up with a zippety title for the interview - “Attention Deficit Police State.”
Scott was spooked when I told him the FBI has added skateboarding as a warning sign for its latest updates to the terrorist profile.
The interview is about 35 minutes long. The discussion about getting free beer while working as a State Highway Department flag man is in the last few minutes.
Tuesday 8th July 2008
The Virtual Iran War Resolution
9:57 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Terrorism | Uncategorized | Comments: 5
This is one of those times that I realize how deficient the English language is in profanity. Congressmen deserve far worse hammering than the vernacular allows.
Congress may vote for a resolution this week that would be a de facto declaration of war on Iran. Iran poses no peril to the U.S. mainland. But since the U.S. military is on a winning streak these days, Congress seemingly wants to give the Bush administration the chance to notch another triumph before it leaves office.
Ron Paul has an excellent summary of this absurdity and its peril here.
On a radio show last week, Paul commented: “I hear members of Congress saying, ‘If we could only them [Iran].”
Apparently, as long as nuking Iran resulted in more campaign contributions to congressmen, it would not count as genocide.
People should raise hell on this issue. And if your congressional representative or senator votes for the pro-war resolution….
Antiwar.com has great coverage of this and many other issues.
Saturday 5th July 2008
Kent Snyder, RIP
11:23 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 0
Kent Snyder, the head of Ron Paul’s Liberty Study Committee and Ron’s right-hand man for much of the last 20 years, passed away last week.
I first recall meeting him when he invited me to talk to a regular dinner that congressman Paul held for fellow-minded members of Congress in the late 1990s. Kent was both very sharp and very gracious - a triple-rare combination in Washington. I never expected a chance to talk about Ruby Ridge in a House Office Building. I ran into him periodically at DC gigs in the subsequent years, and he was usually the calmest person in the room. Living and working in the Beltway area never corrupted his good disposition.
Kent probably did more than anyone else to persuade Ron Paul to run for president last year. (Kent was chairman of the campaign). The subsequent campaign woke up thousands of people to the perils of Leviathan and the bounty of liberty. Hopefully this ‘awakening’ will pay dividends for freedom in the coming years and decades.
Ron Paul’s eloquent tribute to Kent is here, as are comments by Norm Singleton and Daniel McAdams, two Ron Paul legislative staffers who do some of the best work on Capitol Hill.
Monday 30th June 2008
The Capsizing of American Democracy
1:14 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Bush | Congress | Elective Dictatorship | Comments: 4
The Future of Freedom Foundation posted online today this piece from the April issue of Freedom Daily -
THE CAPSIZING OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
by James Bovard
American democracy is capsizing as a result of the vast increase in the number of government dependents and government employees. This has created a voting bloc that overwhelms every other potential force. H.L. Mencken quipped in the 1930s that the New Deal divided America into “those who work for a living and those who vote for a living” — a division truer now than ever before.
In the era of the Founding Fathers, few things were more dreaded than “dependency” — not being one’s own man, not having a truly independent will because of reliance on someone or something else to survive. One of the glories of America was the possibility that common people could become self-reliant with hard work and discipline. Prof. John Philip Reid, the author of The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, summarized 18th-century political thinking: “Property was independence; lack of property was servility, even servitude…. A man without independent wealth could easily be bought and bribed. A man of property had a will of his own.” This was part of the reason that many of the states initially required a property qualification for voters.
Sir William Blackstone, whose work on the English constitution profoundly influenced Americans, observed that a property qualification for suffrage was necessary because if the property-less “had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or other.” Thomas Jefferson warned, “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”
But in modern times, dependency is the highest political good — at least for politicians. Since the 1930s, politicians have striven to leave no vote unbought. Government aid programs have been endlessly expanded, and the government has sought to maximize the number of people willing to accept handouts. Government aid has become redefined as a symbol of self-actualization.
Americans’ dependency on government is soaring. Federal social programs have continued expanding in recent decades despite bipartisan rhetoric about rolling back government spending. The Heritage Foundation created an Index of Dependency to measure the rising number of Americans reliant on government. The index gauges “the pace at which federal government services and programs have been growing in areas in which private or community-based services and programs exist or have existed to address the same or nearly the same needs.” The index is based on housing aid, healthcare and welfare assistance, retirement income, and subsidies for college and other post-secondary education. While private programs were judged by how much they actually helped people, the “success” of government programs “is frequently measured by the growth of the aid program rather than its outcome.”
The Index has a benchmark of 100 for 1980; by 2005, the index reading had risen to 212, signaling more than a doubling of overall dependency on the federal government over the prior quarter century. As a result of the expansion of government “aid” programs into one area after another, subservience rather than initiative is becoming the ticket to prosperity. Now, roughly half of all Americans are dependent on the government, either for handouts, pensions, or paychecks.
Most voters no longer seem concerned about leashing government. Instead, many if not most are primarily concerned with directing the sludge of government benefits in their direction. Voters want to unleash politicians to give them more benefits. When government is viewed as a fount of benefits, limits on government power will appear to be self-deprivation. The more people expect from government, the more biased they become against limiting government power. This was stark in the 1980s debates over a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. The most vehement opponents were organized groups representing senior citizens, government employees such as teachers, and others who rely on government checks to pay the bills.
The key question for many voters is: How much is the candidate offering for my vote? Elections routinely degenerate into “an advance auction sale of stolen goods,” in Mencken’s apt phrase. There is vastly more interest during election campaigns in Social Security handouts and policies than in Justice Department cover-ups and FBI abuses.
A political auction
Sums spent on government vote-buying usually dwarf all private campaign expenditures. Incumbents perennially use the machinery of state to bombard voters with government handouts, often on the flimsiest pretexts. President Clinton turned the Federal Emergency Management Agency into a permanent part of his reelection campaign.
FEMA now routinely blankets residents of swing states with lavish checks for dubious claims for damage from hurricanes and other bad weather. Florida was a key swing state in the 2004 election, and thanks to FEMA and four hurricanes and storms, Florida residents received more FEMA handouts than any state in history. The inspector general revealed in May 2005 that FEMA used a standard that would make a drunken sailor blush. If someone called in and claimed his bed was damaged by a FEMA-recognized adverse weather incident, FEMA insisted on sending him a check to buy an entire new large bedroom suite.
FEMA did not require any evidence that a person actually sustained losses. Instead, anyone who called deserved a check. FEMA shoveled out $31 million in the Miami/Dade County area in the months before the election to compensate people from damage from one storm whose winds never exceeded 45 miles per hour.
More than 4,000 people received more than $8 million to rent temporary housing — even though they had not requested aid and often had suffered little or no home damage. FEMA’s handout standard is the mirror image of that used by the Internal Revenue Service, which has never set up toll-free numbers for people to call and nullify their tax obligations merely by asserting they have zero taxable income.
FEMA vote purchases are bargains compared with other ways incumbents purchase their job security. During his 2004 reelection campaign, Bush often bragged about having gotten Congress to enact a new prescription drug subsidy for the elderly — which is now estimated to cost more than $2 trillion over the next 20 years. Clinton had campaigned for reelection in 1996 by hawking a similar benefit, but had not been able to deliver the goods through a Republican Congress.
Prior to Bush’s Medicare expansion, the record for the most costly reelection campaign may have been held by Richard Nixon, who railroaded a 20 percent hike in Social Security benefits through Congress and then made sure that each senior citizen received a personal letter from him along with the new higher benefit check a few weeks before the 1972 election. Nixon also destroyed economic freedom in order to perpetuate his supposedly pro-free-enterprise administration. In August 1971, he imposed wage and price controls that were supposed to throttle inflationary pressures. At the same time, the Federal Reserve boosted the money supply with a flood of new dollars — creating the appearance of an economic boom while federal controls delayed the evidence of inflation. Nixon’s policies helped cause international financial crises and the worst U.S. recession since World War II.
Democracy and dependence
Politicians have divided America into two blocs of voters labeled “more deserving of others’ paychecks,” and “less deserving of their own paycheck.” Between 1986 and 1996, government transfer payments per capita rose at a rate six times faster than pretax compensation per private worker, according to economist Erich Heinemann. The income of the elderly rose nine times faster than the income for average Americans from 1971 to the late 1990s, largely because Social Security benefits have increased far faster than average wages.
Democracy has also been undermined by the continual growth in the number of government employees. There are more than 20 million government employees in the United States — more than the total number of Americans employed in manufacturing. Not only has the number of government employees multiplied in recent decades, but the rise of government unions further stacks the political odds against private citizens.
Compensation expert Wendell Cox, publisher of the Public Purpose, a newsletter on government unions, estimated that pay for local and state government employees rose more than five times faster than private-sector pay from 1980 to 1998. Cox also found that federal employees receive roughly 50 percent more total compensation than do private employees performing similar jobs.
The sheer number of government employees and welfare recipients effectively transforms the purpose of government from maintaining order to confiscating as much as possible from vulnerable taxpayers. Elections nowadays, instead of a vote on what government should do, are largely referenda on how much it should take. The more government dependents, the more likely that democracy will become a conspiracy against self-reliance. Not all government workers, or all retirees, or all handout recipients will vote for candidates championing big government. However, politicians’ ability to frighten and mobilize much of this huge voter base is often sufficient to turn elections into routs.
The danger of excessive dependency on democracy has been obvious for nearly 2,000 years. Plutarch observed of the dying days of the Roman Republic, “The people were at that time extremely corrupted by the gifts of those who sought office, and most made a constant trade of selling their voices. ”
Once a person becomes a government dependent, his moral standing to resist the expansion of government power is fatally compromised. Every increase in the number of government dependents means an increase in political power. Each increase in the number of government dependents means another person who sees limits on government power as a threat to his own personal well-being.
Anything that increases dependency on government undermines liberty. “Self-government” becomes a farce when the citizen looks to the government three times a day for his next meal, while the government curtsies to the citizen only once every couple of years after often meaningless elections. How can a citizen help steer the ship of state at the same time that he has his hand out for another government benefit?
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003).
Monday 23rd June 2008
George Carlin, RIP
12:33 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 10
George Carlin was one of the most penetrating political commentators of the last half century. He was fearless and merciless to frauds and political con men. He was also a master of the English language.
He was an inspiration and he will be missed.
He had the best thumbnail summary of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal: “Kennedy aimed high. Marilyn Monroe… Bill Clinton showed his dick to a government clerk.”
Nation magazine’s John Nichols has an excellent tribute piece.
I did not always agree with Carlin’s position but his courage and spirit - especially in the post 9/11 kowtowing conformist era - shined like a candle on a dark night.
Tuesday 17th June 2008
Bush Slanders Freedom Again
10:10 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Bush | Torture | Comments: 7
In a Tuesday interview in Britain, Sky News editor Adam Boulton asked George W. Bush: “There are those who would say look, lets take Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, and rendition and all those things and to them that is the complete opposite of freedom.”
BUSH: “Of course, if you want to slander America.”
This is the same tripe Bush has been shoveling ever since the Abu Ghraib photos first surfaced in 2004. Anyone who accurately labels Bush’s policies slanders America.
Sadly, there are still some Americans who swallow this crap. Unfortunately, Bush has gotten away with bastardizing American freedom for six years now.
It’s great that a British journalist had the guts to ask Bush the kind of question that American White House correspondents almost never touch.
h/t Think Progress
Thursday 29th May 2008
Ron Paul’s Good News
10:08 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Uncategorized | Comments: 3
Antiwar.com Radio yesterday posted a very informative interview between Charles Goyette and Ron Paul. At about 10 minutes into the interview, Goyette asked Congressman Paul about my comment on the blog regarding negotiations with the Republican party for a speaking slot at the Republican Convention in September convention.
Congressman Paul replied: “I don’t know where he got that information because there will be no negotiations. And if they [the Republican Party] would call me up and ask - ‘do you I wanted to speak at the convention,’ I would probably say yes.” Paul added that “there is zero chance of that happening - so there are no negotiations going on.”
I’m glad to hear that the Paul campaign is not currently negotiating for a speaking slot. It’s good that seeking the podium at the convention will not impede Paul’s criticism of Bush’s foreign aggression.
As I have said before, Ron Paul is America’s best congressman. It is great that Paul’s campaign has awakened many Americans to the perils of government and the value of liberty.
Paul’s comments in the Antiwar.com Radio interview are especially helpful in resolving the different signals from his campaign staff and other officials in recent months on this issue:
The Washington Post reported on May 6 that “Paul’s campaign hopes to turn such support into upward of 50 delegates for the party’s national convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September, where he is gunning for a speaking slot.”
On May 9, the Boston Globe reported that Paul’s Maine coordinator, Ken Lindell, declared, “The goal at the national convention is to get a speaking slot for Dr. Paul to deliver that message.”
The Los Angeles Times blog on May 12 reported that Ron Paul supporters “hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot.”
Fox News reported the same day that according to Jesse Benton’s comments, “Paul is planning on having as big a delegation as possible at the convention, and he continues to seek a speaking opportunity there, something the party has not offered to him yet.”
The focus on a speaking slot has been mentioned by the campaign off and on going since early February. On February 12, MSNBC reported that after the Super Tuesday showings, “Paul’s goal, according to spokesman Benton, is to get a substantial delegation to convention (they estimate they’ll have about 42 delegates) get a good speaking spot, and ‘spread the conservative message.’”
These comments confirm what top operatives said at a meeting of a few dozen of Ron Paul’s key supporters in Washington in late April, according to one attendee.
**
I hope Ron Paul gets a great speaking slot at the GOP convention. Giving the delegates and the television audience a double-barrel dose of truth could be the best tonic the nation receives this Fall.
Tuesday 27th May 2008
Ron Paul Goes “Respectful”
1:36 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Comments: 10
The Washington Post has an article today on the number of Ron Paul’s relatives who worked for his presidential campaign.
I will be curious if there are other analyses of how the Paul campaign spent $30 million.
The Post article quoted Paul campaign spokesman Jesse Benton saying that Paul would be “continuing a positive, respectful campaign to influence the policies of the Republican Party.”
How can one run a “respectful” campaign when the opponent favors quasi-genocide?
At what moment did the Ron Paul campaign decide to begin pulling their punches?
According to one insider, Ron Paul is now focusing primarily on negotiating with the Republican National Committee to get a good speaking slot at the Republican Convention in September.
Instead of bringing down the roof, is Ron Paul now angling for a seat at the table?
UPDATE: I also posted this comment on the Antiwar.com Blog. It has sparked some heated replies….
UPDATE #2: Some folks on the Antiwar.com Blog are questioning whether Congressman Paul is focusing on getting a speaking slot at the GOP convention. The Washington Post reported on May 6 that “Paul’s campaign hopes to turn such support into upward of 50 delegates for the party’s national convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September, where he is gunning for a speaking slot.”
The Paul campaign did not dispute this report when it was published earlier this month.
Monday 26th May 2008
FFF Conference Next Week
9:50 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Comments: 0
The Future of Freedom Foundation will hold their second annual foreign policy/civil liberties conference next week in Reston, Va. The conference runs from June 6 to June 8. The $495 fee cover all meals and 20 speakers.
I will be speaking on Friday around 1:30 on “Bush’s War on Civil Liberties.” Tricky to find enough material on that topic to round out a speech…
Anthony Gregory, one of the most popular speakers at last year’s event, provides a lively summary of what this year’s conference will cover and why folks should go.
No Justice on Memorial Day
11:03 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Bush | Comments: 6
Here is a great Washington Post photo of Bush strutting at the White House as he receives visitors from the Rolling Thunder veterans motorcycle group.
It is obscene how the same politicians who send Americans to die in unnecessary wars are treated like heroes on Memorial Day.
One would hope that this day, above all others, would be a time for condemning those whose lies and failures resulted in thousands of their fellow citizens being killed.
I am puzzled how Vietnam Veterans could have anything but utter disdain for politicians, considering how they were sacrificed for the convenience of LBJ and Nixon.
Instead, the Rolling Thunder crew proudly presented Bush with one of their leather jackets. Bush told them: “I want to thank you and all your comrades for being so patriotic and loving our country as much as you do.”
The Post article on the Rolling Thunder riders has evoked a tidal wave of comments, including comments from veterans furious to see Bush being treated like a hero by their fellow soldiers.
Saturday 24th May 2008
The Democratic-Peace Fraud
10:27 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Comments: 4
The Future of Freedom Foundation posted online my piece from the March 2008 Freedom Daily on why democracy is no cure for war. Here’s my 2 cents on the topic -
The Democratic-Peace Fraud
by James Bovard
The doctrine of “democratic peace” now provides vital camouflage for the American war machine. Michael Novak, a theologian with the pro-war American Enterprise Institute, observed, “Democracy is the new name for peace.” The idea that democracies never fight wars against each other has become axiomatic for many scholars. Prof. Jack Levy commented in 1989 that the democratic-peace doctrine is “as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.”
This doctrine has long proven handy for presidents seeking the moral high ground for U.S. artillery. When Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany on April 2, 1917, he proclaimed, “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.” He said nothing about making democracy safe for the world.
Wilson assured America, “A steadfast concern for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants.”
Wilson promised that there would be no secret deals among the allies to seize territory or carve up their conquests. Later in 1917, after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, they published an array of secret agreements that the Allied powers had made shortly after the war began to plunder German, Turkish, and Austro-Hungarian possessions.
Faith in this democratic-peace doctrine has revived in recent decades. Ronald Reagan declared that “the surest guarantee we have of peace is national freedom and democratic government.” Bill Clinton also embraced the doctrine and used it to sanctify his foreign policy time and again.
But no president has been half as liberal in invoking the doctrine as George W. Bush. In his 2005 State of the Union address, he declared, “Because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace.”
The only way that history supports this doctrine is to exclude all the cases of wars between democracies. This theory can survive only as long as people look at history in a way that is so contorted that it makes the typical political campaign speech appear honest. Some of the advocates of the democratic-peace doctrine are slippery regarding categories, as if the fact that a nation starts a war proves that it is not a democracy.
Democracy versus democracy
There are plenty of cases to refute the democratic-peace claims. As professors Thomas Schwartz and Kiron Skinner noted, Britain, the mother of parliaments, “fought the United States in 1776 and 1812 and revolutionary France in its comparatively democratic years of 1793 and 1795. In 1848 the United States fought Mexico, not a perfect democracy but a good one for the times.”
The American Civil War was the biggest clash in the Western world between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. Both the United States and the Confederacy were representative governments with presidents supposedly bound by constitutions.
Britain’s Boer War, 1899–1902, involved the brutal crushing by one democratic government of another democratic government, as well as the pioneering of concentration camps and other methods of suppression that would become far more widespread in the 20th century.
The First World War was by far the bloodiest conflict in human history up to that time. Schwartz and Skinner noted, “Woodrow Wilson proclaimed a war for democracy against ‘Prussian dictatorship,’ but that was propaganda. Germany had civil rights, an elected parliament, competing parties, universal male suffrage, and an unparalleled system of social democracy.” Germany was far more democratic than either the British or French empire.
Professor Joanne Gowa, author of Ballots and Bullets, examined “pairs of states between 1815 and 1981” and found “no statistically significant relationship between democracy and peace before 1946.” After World War II, democracies rarely fought each other because most of them were allied against a Soviet threat that was far more perilous than quibbles over trade flows or fishing rights. However, the fact that New Zealand and Switzerland have never fought each other is not sufficient basis for an iron law of international relations.
The democratic-peace theory implies that there is latent wisdom in majorities — or some deep-seated love of peace that will triumph after a majority takes control of government policy. Or perhaps once people are permitted to vote, they suddenly become immune to bloodlust. But Columbia University professors Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, in a 1995 study titled “Democratization and War” published in Foreign Affairs, stressed that democratization can spur wars:
Formerly authoritarian states where democratic participation is on the rise are more likely to fight wars than are stable democracies or autocracies. States that make the biggest leap, from total autocracy to extensive mass democracy — like contemporary Russia — are about twice as likely to fight wars in the decade after democratization as are states that remain autocracies.
Mansfield and Snyder analyzed data from 1811 to 1980 on wars and regimes classified as democratic, autocratic, or mixed, and viewed “democratization as a gradual process.” They concluded that “an increase in the openness of the selection process for the chief executive doubled the likelihood of war…. States changing from a mixed regime to democracy were on average about 50 percent more likely to become engaged in war (and about two-thirds more likely to go to war with another nation-state) than states that remained mixed regimes.” They warned, “This concoction of nationalism and incipient democratization has been an intoxicating brew, leading in case after case to ill-conceived wars of expansion.”
Another key to the myth of “democratic peace” is to disregard the long record of democracies attacking nondemocracies. Bush, defending U.S. military action in Iraq, declared, “Free societies are peaceful nations. What we’re doing for the long term, we’re promoting freedom.” However, since World War II, the United States either attacked or invaded the following nations:
Korea, 1950–53
Lebanon, 1958
Vietnam, 1961–73
Laos, 1964–73
Dominican Republic, 1965–66
Cambodia, 1969–70
Lebanon, 1982–84
Grenada, 1983
Libya, 1986
Panama, 1989
Iraq, 1991–2005
Somalia, 1992–94
Croatia, 1994
Haiti, 1994
Bosnia, 1995
Sudan, 1998
Afghanistan, 1998
Yugoslavia, 1999
Afghanistan, 2001–05
Other democracies also lack pacifist resumes. Britain, which was a constitutional republic that became increasingly democratic as the 20th century wore on, attacked many nations to expand or defend its empire. Since the government of Israel was established in 1947/48, it has attacked Egypt (1956), Egypt and Syria (1967), and Lebanon (1982–2006), as well as engaging in more than 35 years of armed struggle against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. It also engaged in a defensive war in 1973 against Egypt and Syria.
Unless we assume that it is morally irrelevant when democratic governments kill people in nondemocratic countries, the bellicose record of democratic governments must be considered. The fact that democracies have been rare in history cannot whitewash democracies per se. The fact is that democracies attack.
Of course, the records of the worst authoritarian and totalitarian governments — Hitler’s Germany, Soviet Russia, Red China, as well as other communist regimes — are far worse than those of Western democracies. But “not as bad as Stalin” is not the standard that democratic-peace advocates invoke to deify their preferred form of government.
Voters and war
Some democratic-peace theorists sound as if the simple act of popular voting somehow makes government nonaggressive. And regardless of how much the government deceives people about the likely costs of a war, citizens will still demand peace. Randolph Bourne noted one reason that popular preferences could not rein in bellicose governments:
In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.
The democratic-peace theory presumes that people have a leash on the government, rather than vice versa. But there is nothing inherent in democracies to make people immune to the manipulation of war parties.
The notion that democracy will end all mass killings implies that there is some nobility latent within the masses that merely requires a change in the process of selecting a nation’s rulers to blossom. That would hold true if the only reason people sought blood was that they had not picked their own chiefs. The history of mobs does not indicate that popular selection of leaders ensures nonviolence.
The democratic-peace doctrine also assumes some level of soundness or comprehension on the part of the typical citizen. Yet citizens on average are far more ignorant of foreign affairs than they are of domestic events. The greater the ignorance, the more easily politicians can fan hatred and fear.
The democratic-peace theory presumes that citizens are keenly aware of the potential costs, in blood and treasure, of their nation’s plunging into conflicts. However, nowadays, most Americans’ primary experience of war is as something to alleviate the boredom during the off-season of their favorite sport. War is now free moral glory, a no-cost way to be a part of Bush’s effort to save the world. As long as people attach a “Support Our Troops” sticker to their SUVs, their sacrifice is sufficient. Thanks to massive deficit financing, no American has paid an extra dime in taxes to cover the $400+ billion the U.S. government has already spent in Iraq. The cost of Bush’s war simply does not exist in the minds of most Americans.
The theory of democratic peace provides a pretext for war. When he was asked on April 4, 2005, why the United States should continue suffering most of the casualties and paying most of the costs in Iraq, Bush replied, “The action is worth it to make sure that democracy exists, and because democracies will yield peace, and that’s what we want.” In a late 2004 press conference, he declared, “The only way to achieve peace is for there to be democracies living side by side. Democracies don’t fight each other.”
Supposedly, any government that is not a democracy is now simply a war waiting to happen. Because democracies never attack other democracies, they are entitled to launch unprovoked attacks on nondemocracies to force them to become democracies — and thereby ensure peace. Because democracy is the same as peace, warring to spread democracy is the same as working for peace. The Bush administration is apparently confident that few Americans remember Orwell’s “war is peace” slogan from 1984.
And after all enemies and potential enemies of democracy have been exterminated (or incarcerated for life without trial), bliss and tranquility will reign forever and ever. There will be no more wars after “democracy” conquers the world. But the notion that there will be lasting, transcendent benefits from the next war(s) is a common canard of politicians and warmongers. The result is “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” in historian Charles Beard’s apt phrase.
The popularity of the doctrine that democracies do not attack each other is another tribute to the historical illiteracy of both politicians and prominent commentators. The doctrine that democracies never fight each other should have been laughed out of existence after its first promenade. Yet, as long as Clinton, and later Bush, recited the democratic-peace dogma, all contrary evidence vanished from the scales of respectable judgment. The theory serves the interests of the government — the ultimate test of truth in Washington. The primary effect of the doctrine of democratic peace has been to lower Americans’ resistance to U.S. government foreign aggression.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003)
Wednesday 14th May 2008
Now Online: Podcast of BMW Horse**** Interview!
8:37 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Bush | Terrorism | wool | Comments: 1
Talk show host Brian Wilson and I had a rattlin’ good chat on WSPD in Toledo today. We kicked hell out of the Homegrown Terrorism and Violent Radicalization BS Act now before the Senate. There were wine, beer, and cigar jokes, as well as expressions of condolence to the Israeli Prime Minister who might be indicted for taking bribes on the same day Bush arrives to visit. But at least Olmert has a great character witness: Bush announced yesterday that Olmert is an “honest man.”
At the end of the interview, we discussed Bob Barr’s candidancy for the LP presidential nomination.
The whole shebang is @ 16 minutes and is accessible at this website.
** The title of this blog entry refers to comments regarding how Congress names legislation.
Sunday 11th May 2008
Terrorist Cabal on the Potomac?
4:56 pm | Bovard | Terrorism | Comments: 2
I don’t know for sure that those two were with Hezbollah - or maybe Hamas - but you can’t be too careful in an area perfect for launching kayak attacks on the DC bridges. Unless of course the kayakers drowned before getting that far (as often happens in these waters).
Seems like half the people that throng near this vantage point speak foreign languages. I recognized an Iranian there recently - he was doubly suspicious, since he’s also on an Home Owners Association board. Bound to be some people passing through this area who are already listed on the Terrorist Watch List. Almost none of the cars in the nearby parking lot had yellow “Support Our Troops” stickers.
Where is Homeland Security Czar Mike Chertoff when you need him???
The photo works better in the full size version here.
Ellsberg’s Excellent Memoir
4:24 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Uncategorized | Comments: 2
My latest article in Freedom Daily is “Ellsberg’s Lesson for Our Time.” I should have read Daniel Ellsberg’s excellent memoirs - SECRETS: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers - long ago. But better late than never.
Here is the lead of the article:
Daniel Ellsberg is the kind of American who should receive a Medal of Freedom. Except that the Medals of Freedom are distributed by presidents who routinely give them to “useful idiots” and apologists for their wars and power grabs. It should be renamed the Medal for Enabling or Applauding Official Crimes in the Name of Freedom.
Ellsberg knowingly risked spending a life in prison to bring the truth about the Vietnam War to Americans. He had hoped truth would set Americans free from the spell of official lies. But the experience in Iraq indicates that Americans have learned little if anything from the Vietnam-era deceits.
(The Future of Freedom Foundation puts the full text of Freedom Daily articles online a few months after the print/email version appears).
Thursday 8th May 2008
GoLeft TV Interview Now Online -Radio Broadcast on Saturday
5:31 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Bush | Comments: 0
Mike Papantonio of the “Ring of Fire” nationally-syndicated radio program “Ring of Fire” recently interviewed me regarding article on “The 9/11 Servility Reflex.” I just heard from his producer Farron Cousins: “Your interview is going to run on this Saturday’s program, at the top of the second hour. We air from 3p - 6p Eastern on Saturday, and we are rebroadcast from 8p - 11p on Sunday evening. In addition, we’ve got the interview up on GoLeft TV now, and you can get to it by clicking on the link below.”
Here is the website for the Ring of Fire radio show. I think it will list the times and frequencies for local shows.
Tuesday 6th May 2008
AmeriCorps’ Latest Triumphs
7:58 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Uncategorized | Comments: 1
The current issue of Ripon Forum includes a piece I wrote on the case against AmeriCorps and other national service boondoggles. The Forum is published by the Ripon Society, an organization of liberal Republicans founded in 1965. The same issue of the magazine features articles by Bob Dole, George HW Bush, and Chris Shays. I fit right into the line-up.
The National Service Illusion Ripon Forum April/May 2008
JAMES BOVARD
National Service is one of the hottest causes of presidential candidates. Both Barack Obama and John McCain are gung-ho for expanding Americorps to hire a quarter million people to perform federally-orchestrated good deeds. Former presidential candidate Senator Chris Dodd wanted to make community service mandatory for high school students and boost AmeriCorps to a million members. John Edwards also favored making national service mandatory.
But does America have a shortage of government workers?
AmeriCorps is the epitome of contemporary federal good intentions. AmeriCorps, which currently has roughly 75,000 paid recruits, has been very popular in Washington in part because it puts a smiley face on Uncle Sam at a time when many government policies are deeply unpopular.
AmeriCorps has consumed more than $4 billion in tax dollars since its creation in 1993. During the Clinton administration, AmeriCorps members helped run a program in Buffalo that gave children $5 for each toy gun they brought in — as well as a certificate praising their decision not to play with toy guns. In San Diego, AmeriCorps members busied themselves collecting used bras and panties for a homeless shelter. In Los Angeles, AmeriCorps members busied themselves foisting unreliable ultra-low-flush toilets on poor people. In New Jersey, AmeriCorps members enticed middle-class families to accept subsidized federal health insurance for their children.
President George W. Bush was a vigorous supporter of AmeriCorps in his 2000 campaign, and many Republicans expected that his team would make the program a pride to the nation. But the program is still an administrative train wreck. In 2002, it illegally spent more than $64 million than Congress appropriated – and yet was rewarded with a higher budget.
Bush’s first AmeriCorps chief, Leslie Lenkowsky, started out as a visionary idealist who promised great things from the federal program. But, when he resigned in 2003, Lenkowsky conceded that AmeriCorps is just “another cumbersome, unpredictable government bureaucracy.”
Though AmeriCorps abounds in “feel good” projects, it has never provided credible evidence of benefit to the United States. Instead, it relies on Soviet bloc-style accounting — merely counting labor inputs and pretending that the raw numbers prove grandiose achievements. The Office of Management and Budget concluded in 2003 that “AmeriCorps has not been able to demonstrate results. Its current focus is on the amount of time a person serves, as opposed to the impact on the community or participants.” The General Accounting Office noted that AmeriCorps “generally reports the results of its programs and activities by quantifying the amount of services AmeriCorps participants perform.” GAO criticized AmeriCorps for failing to make any effort to measure the actual effect of its members’ actions.
Most AmeriCorps success claims have no more credibility than a political campaign speech. The vast majority of AmeriCorps programs are “self-evaluated”: the only evidence AmeriCorps possesses of what a program achieved is what the grant recipients claim. One of the agency’s consultants encouraged AmeriCorps programs to inflate the number of claimed beneficiaries: “If you feel your program affects a broad group of individuals who may not be receiving personal services from members… then list the whole community.”
The advocates of a vast national service program assume that there are legions of unmet needs that the new government workers could perform. But the reason such needs are currently unmet is that politicians have either considered them not part of government’s obligation or because meeting the need is not considered worth the cost to taxpayers. There are hundreds of thousands of government agencies across the land, counting federal, state, and local governments. There are already more than 20 million people working for government in this country. Yet national service advocates talk as if the public sector is starved of resources.
National Service programs are more profitable for politicians than for citizens. USA Today noted in 1998 that AmeriCorps’ “T-shirted brigade is most well known nationally as the youthful backdrop for White House photo ops.” President Bush politically exploited AmeriCorps members almost as often as did Clinton.
Some congressmen also profiteer off AmeriCorps’ image. After some congressmen showed up one day in March 2004 to hammer some nails at a Habitat for Humanity house-building project in Washington, AmeriCorps issued a press release hyping their participation in the good deed. The press release named eight members of Congress and noted, “Working alongside the elected officials were two dozen AmeriCorps members from the D.C. chapter of Habitat for Humanity and AmeriCorps.” The home they helped build was to be given to a single mother of three. Photos from the appearance could add flourishes to newsletters to constituents or for reelection campaigns. Congressmen also benefit when they announce AmeriCorps grants to organizations in their districts.
Some national service advocates insist that AmeriCorps’ failings should not be held against proposals to expand the federal role in service because their preferred program would leave it up to communities to decide how to use the new “volunteers.”
But if programs are not centrally controlled, local “initiatives” will soon transform it into a national laughingstock. This happened with CETA, a make-work program that was expanded to its doom under President Carter. CETA bankrolled such job-creating activities as building an artificial rock in Oregon for rock climbers to practice on, conducting a nude sculpture class in Miami where aspiring artists practiced Braille reading on each other, and sending CETA workers door-to-door in Florida to recruit people for food stamps.
More than 60 million Americans work as unpaid volunteers each year. Even if AmeriCorps was expanded to a quarter million recruits, it would amount to less than one half of one percent of the total of people who donate their time for what they consider good causes. And there is no reason to assume that paying “volunteers” multiplies productivity.
Rather than expanding national service programs, Congress should pull the plug on AmeriCorps. At a time of soaring deficits, the federal government can no longer afford to spend half a billion dollars a year on a bogus volunteer program whose results have been AWOL since the last century.
–###–
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, 2006), Feeling Your Pain (St. Martin’s 2000), Lost Rights (St. Martin’s, 1994), and other books.
Monday 5th May 2008
Warring as Lying
1:54 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Lying | Comments: 4
The Future of Freedom Foundation posted online today my article from the February issue of Freedom Daily on lying & warring. Amazing to see how much hokum politicians get away with when they commence killing foreigners…..
Warring as Lying Throughout American History
by James Bovard Freedom Daily February 2008
Americans are taught to expect their elected leaders to be relatively honest. But it wasn’t always like that. In the mid 1800s, people joked about political candidates who claimed to have been born in a log cabin that they built with their own hands. This jibe was spurred by William Henry Harrison’s false claim of a log-cabin birth in the 1840 presidential campaign.
Americans were less naive about dishonest politicians in the first century after this nation’s founding. But that still did not deter presidents from conjuring up wars. Presidential deceits on foreign policy have filled cemeteries across the land. George W. Bush’s deceits on the road to war with Iraq fit a long pattern of brazen charades.
In 1846, James K. Polk took Americans to war after falsely proclaiming that the Mexican army had crossed the U.S. border and attacked a U.S. army outpost — “shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.” Though Polk refused to provide any details of where the attack occurred, the accusation swayed enough members of Congress to declare war against Mexico. Congressman Abraham Lincoln vigorously attacked Polk for his deceits. But Lincoln may have studied Polk’s methods, since they helped him whip up war fever 15 years later.
In 1917, Woodrow Wilson took the nation to war in a speech to Congress that contained one howler after another. He proclaimed that “self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies” — despite the role of the British secret service and propaganda operations in the prior years to breed war fever in the United States. Wilson hailed Russia as a nation that had always been “democratic at heart” — less than a month after the fall of the tsar and not long before the Bolshevik Revolution. He proclaimed that the government would show its friendship and affection for German-Americans at home — but his administration was soon spearheading loyalty drives that spread terror in many communities across the land.
In 1940, in one of his final speeches of the presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt assured voters, “Your president says this country is not going to war.” At the time, he was violating the Neutrality Act by providing massive military assistance to Britain and was searching high and low for a way to take the United States into war against Hitler.
In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt denounced those Americans with “such suspicious souls — who feared that I have made ‘commitments’ for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties” at the summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. In early 1945, Roosevelt told Congress that the Yalta Agreement “spells the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliance and spheres of influence.” In reality, he signed off on Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the crushing of any hopes for democracy in Poland.
In August 1945, Harry Truman announced to the world that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.” Hiroshima was actually a major city with more than a third of a million people prior to its incineration. But Truman’s lie helped soften the initial impact on the American public of the first use of the atomic bomb. (The U.S. government also vigorously censored photographs of Hiroshima and its maimed survivors.)
Vietnam falsehoods
Presidential and other government lies on foreign policy are often discounted because they are presumed to be motivated by national security. But as Hannah Arendt noted in an essay on the Pentagon Papers, during the Vietnam War, “The policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but chiefly if not exclusively destined for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.”
CIA analysts did excellent work in the early period of the Vietnam conflict. But “in the contest between public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public,” Arendt commented. The truth never had a chance when it did not serve Lyndon Johnson’s political calculations.
Vietnam destroyed the credibility of both Lyndon Johnson and the American military. Yet the memory of the pervasive lies of the military establishment did not curb the gullibility of many people for fresh government-created falsehoods a decade or so later.
During the 1980s, the U.S. State Department ran a propaganda campaign that placed numerous articles in the U.S. media praising the Nicaraguan Contras and attacking the Sandinista regime. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in 2002, the State Department “fed the Miami Herald a make-believe story that the Soviet Union had given chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. Another tale, which happened to emerge the night of President Ronald Reagan’s reelection victory, held that Soviet MiG fighters were on their way to Nicaragua.” The General Accounting Office investigated and concluded that the State Department operation was illegal, consisting of “prohibited, covert propaganda activities.” There was no backlash against the government when the frauds were disclosed. Instead, it was on to the next scam.
Reagan, Bush, and Clinton
Reagan paved the way for subsequent presidents in immersing anti-terrorist policy in swamps of falsehoods. In October 1983, a month after he authorized U.S. Marine commanders to call in air strikes against Muslims to help the Christian forces in Lebanon’s civil war, a Muslim suicide bomber devastated a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 242 Americans. In a televised speech a few days later, Reagan portrayed the attack as unstoppable, falsely claiming that the truck “crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements. The guards opened fire, but it was too late.” In reality, the guards did not fire because they were prohibited from having loaded weapons — one of many pathetic failures of defense that the Reagan administration sought to sweep under the carpet.
In 1984, after the second successful devastating attack in 18 months against a poorly defended U.S. embassy in Lebanon, Reagan blamed the debacle on his predecessor and falsely asserted that the Carter administration had “to a large extent” gotten “rid of our intelligence agents.” A few days later, while campaigning for reelection, Reagan announced that the second embassy bombing was no longer an issue: “We’ve had an investigation. There was no evidence of any carelessness or anyone not performing their duty.” However, the Reagan administration had not yet begun a formal investigation.
On May 4, 1986, Reagan bragged, “The United States gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees. We make no concessions; we make no deals.” But the Iranian arms-for-hostage deal that leaked out later that year blew such claims to smithereens. On November 13, 1986, Reagan denied initial reports of the scandal, proclaiming that the “‘no concessions’ [to terrorists] policy remains in force, in spite of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages and alleged ransom payments. We did not — repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages nor will we.” But Americans later learned that the United States had sold 2,000 anti-tank weapons to the Iranian government “in return for promises to release the American hostages there. Money from the sale of those weapons went to support the Contras’ war in Nicaragua,” as Mother Jones magazine noted in 1998.
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 provided a challenge for the first Bush administration to get Americans mobilized. In September 1990, the Pentagon announced that up to a quarter million Iraqi troops were near the border of Saudi Arabia, threatening to give Saddam Hussein a stranglehold on one of the world’s most important oil sources. The Pentagon based its claim on satellite images that it refused to disclose. One American paper, the St. Petersburg Times, purchased two Soviet satellite “images taken of that same area at the same time that revealed that there were no Iraqi troops ‘near the Saudi border — just empty desert.’” Jean Heller, the journalist who broke the story, commented, “That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.” Even a decade after the first Gulf war, the Pentagon refused to disclose the secret photos that justified sending half a million American troops into harm’s way.
Support for the war was also whipped up by the congressional testimony of a Kuwaiti teenager who claimed she had seen Iraqi soldiers removing hundreds of babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them on the floor to die. George H.W. Bush often invoked the incubator tale to justify the war, proclaiming that the “ghastly atrocities” were akin to “Hitler revisited.” After the United States commenced bombing Iraq, it transpired that the woman who testified was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and that her story was a complete fabrication, concocted in part by a U.S. public relations firm. Dead babies were a more effective selling point than one of the initial justifications Bush announced for U.S. intervention — restoring Kuwait’s “rightful leaders to their place” — as if any Americans seriously cared about putting Arab oligarchs back on their throne. (A few months before Saddam’s invasion, Amnesty International condemned the Kuwaiti government for torturing detainees.)
Bill Clinton’s unprovoked war against Serbia was sold to Americans with preposterous tales of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s being freedom fighters, with absurd claims that a civil war in one corner of southeastern Europe threatened to engulf the entire continent in conflict, with wild and unsubstantiated claims of an ongoing genocide, and with a deluge of lies that the U.S. military was not targeting Serb civilians.
Lying and warring appear to be two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, many Americans continue to be gullible when presidents claim a need to commence killing foreigners. It remains to be seen whether the citizenry is corrigible on this life-and-death issue.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003).
Thursday 1st May 2008
NOW ONLINE Mp3 of the Interview with Brian Wilson
5:53 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Comments: 0
The zippety interview from last Friday with talk show host Brian Wilson is now online here. (The MP3 list is on the left side).
The same page has surprising background on Brian. I was not aware of the two weeks he teamed up with Seigfried and Roy.
That explains why he dislikes beer.
Friday 25th April 2008
Listen Live Radio 2 pm Friday (4/25) Brian Wilson Show in Baltimore
8:14 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Comments: 7
Talk show legend Brian Wilson is back on air in Baltimore. As the Baltimore Sun reported a few weeks ago, “No matter what happens, Brian Wilson can’t seem to stay away from Baltimore for long.”
I will be on his program on WHFS (105.7 FM) at 2 pm today (Friday, 4/25). You can listen live here. (The listen live link is in the upper right hand corner of the page).
Thursday 24th April 2008
Finally - a Good Ron Paul Antiwar TV Ad!
2:59 pm | Bovard | Ron Paul | Comments: 8
The folks at American Liberty Coalition have crafted a powerful antiwar ad promoting Ron Paul for president. This minute long ad conveys Ron Paul’s passion and his concern about the ruinous costs of the current wars and the peril of Bush attacking Iran.
The Liberty Coalition solicited donations to help pay for airing the ad, and this may have contributed to the Paul campaign’s 16% tally in the Pennsylvania primary. Their efforts - and the elbow grease of many other volunteers in Pennsylvania - made a big difference.
The private ad is in sharp contrast to this “Ron Paul - Conservative Choice” radio ad created by the Paul campaign and run on Pennsylvania stations. The ad seems confusing and diffident. It starts out mentioning amnesty for illegal aliens and campaign finance reform’s restrictions on free speech - but doesn’t specify that these are John McCain positions. The ad mentions that Ron Paul has received more contributions from active duty military than all other candidates combined - but fails to mention that this is largely the result of Paul’s staunch opposition to the Iraq debacle.
It is good that Ron Paul got 128,000 votes in Pennsylvania. But how many more votes might the campaign have harvested across the nation if they had used the $35 million Americans donated to them to send a clear antiwar message from start to finish?
I would be curious to know the impressions of Pennsylvanians (and others) on how the campaign there played out.
Thursday 17th April 2008
Congress Quietly Repeals Martial Law Provision
8:42 am | Bovard | Comments: 8
In late 2006, Congress revised the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act to make it far easier for a president to declare martial law. Those changes were repealed at the end of this January as part of Public Law 110-181 (HR 4986), the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (signed into law by President Bush on January 28, 2008).
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), who championed the opposition to the original law, was also the hero of the repeal. It helped that all the nation’s governors opposed the 2006 law.
Boise State Professor Charlotte Twight, the author of the excellent Dependent on DC, alerted me to the change last night. I checked on Nexis and the only news coverage I found regarding the repeal was a 322-word Gannett News wire story from February 1 that focused on how the repeal made governors happy.
I first wrote about the Posse/Insurrection peril for American Conservative a year ago. My most recent piece on the subject was an article for the January issue of the Future of Freedom Foundation’s (FFF) Freedom Daily. The law was changed between the time the article was published and when FFF posted the January article online on April 9.
Tuesday 15th April 2008
Ron Paul Supporters Rally at Capitol
5:00 pm | Bovard | Ron Paul | Uncategorized | Comments: 11
A couple hundred Ron Paul supporters gathered in front of the Capitol today to hear speakers @organized by the Granny Warriors.
I stopped by mid afternoon. I was told by one attendee that “Ron Paul came by and spoke around 11:15. Unfortunately, the sound system was not yet working at that point.” He said he had heard Congressman Paul might return and speak again later today.
Here are some pics. Full size versions are available at my Flickr page here.
Wednesday 9th April 2008
White House Choreographed Torture Sessions
9:38 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Torture | Comments: 11
ABC has a bombshell tonight about how Cheney and other top Bush administration officials would sit at the White House and decide exactly how Muslim detainees would be tortured.
ABC noted: “The high-level discussions about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.”
Sitting around a table and deciding how many times each Muslim detainee can be whacked up side the head sounds like the ultimate NeoCon masturbatory fantasy.
Even prize-Constitution stomper John Ashcroft had qualms about the meetings, reportedly warning, “History will not judge this kindly.”
What does it take to get someone indicted for war crimes in this country any more?
Martial Law Act of 2006
1:28 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Bush | Uncategorized | dictatorship | Comments: 3
The Future of Freedom Foundation today posted online my article from the January 2008 issue of Freedom Daily on Martial Law. Without further ado…
The Martial Law Act of 2006
by James Bovard
Martial law is perhaps the ultimate stomping of freedom. And yet, on September 30, 2006, Congress passed a provision in a 591-page bill that will make it easy for President Bush to impose martial law in response to a terrorist “incident.” It also empowers him to effectively declare martial law in response to what he or other federal officials label a shortfall of “public order” — whatever that means.
It took only a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president’s ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened those restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the United States without the express permission of Congress. (This act was passed after the depredations of the U.S. military throughout the Southern states during Reconstruction.)But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act aim to deter dictatorship while permitting a narrow window for the president to temporarily use the military at home. But the 2006 reforms basically threw any concern about dictatorial abuses out the window.Section 1076 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2006 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from “Insurrection Act” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list of pretexts to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition” — and such a “condition” is not defined or limited.
One might think that given the experience with the USA PATRIOT Act and many other abuses of power, Congress would be leery about giving this president his biggest blank check yet to suspend the Constitution. But that would be naive.
The new law was put in place in response to the debacle of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. There was no evidence that permitting a president far more power would avoid future debacles, but such a law provides a comfort blanket to politicians. The risk of tyranny is irrelevant compared with the reduction of risk of embarrassment to politicians.
According to Washington, the correct response to Katrina is not to recognize the failure of relying on federal agencies a thousand miles away but rather to vastly increase the power of the president to dictate a solution, regardless of whether he knows what he is doing and regardless of whether local and state rights are trampled.
The new law also empowers the president to commandeer the National Guard of one state to send to another state for as many as 365 days. Bush could send the South Carolina National Guard to suppress anti-war protests in New Haven. Or the next president could send the Massachusetts National Guard to disarm the residents of Wyoming, if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semi-automatic weapons. Governors’ control of the National Guard can be trumped with a simple presidential declaration.
Section 1076 had bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, including support from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Since the law would give the feds more power, it was very popular inside the Beltway.
On the other hand, every governor in the country opposed the changes. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned on September 19, 2006, that “we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law.” Leahy’s alarm got no response. Ten days later, he commented in the Congressional Record, “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.”
A U.S. Enabling Act
The new law vastly increases the danger from the actions of government provocateurs. If there is an incident now like the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993, it would be far easier for the president to declare martial law — even if, as then, it was an FBI informant who taught the culprits how to make the bomb. Even if the FBI masterminds a protest that turns violent, the president could invoke the “incident” to suspend the Constitution.
“Martial law” is a euphemism for military dictatorship. When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred. Perhaps some conservatives believe that the only change when martial law is declared is that people are no longer read their Miranda rights before they are locked away. “Martial law” means: Obey soldiers’ commands or be shot. The abuses of military rule in Southern states during Reconstruction were legendary, but they have been swept under the historical rug.
Section 1076 is an Enabling Act-type legislation — something which purports to preserve law and order while formally empowering the president to rule by decree.
Bush can commandeer a state’s National Guard any time he declares a “state has refused to enforce applicable laws.” Does this refer to the laws as they are commonly understood — or to the “laws” after Bush “fixes” them with a signing statement? Unfortunately, it is not possible for Americans to commandeer the federal government even when Bush admits that he is breaking a law (such as the Anti-Torture Act).
Section 1076 is the type of “law” that would probably be denounced by the U.S. State Department’s Annual Report on Human Rights if enacted by a foreign government. But when the U.S. government does the same thing, it is merely another proof of benevolent foresight. The “comfort blanket” on Section 1076 is that the powers will not be abused because the president will show more concern with the Bill of Rights than Congress did when it rubberstamped this provision. This is the same “pass the buck on the Constitution” that worked so well with the PATRIOT Act, the McCain Feingold Campaign Reform Act, and the Military Commissions Act. As long as there is hypothetically some branch of the government that will object to oppression, no one has the right to fear losing his liberties.
The military on the home front
Section 1076 is more ominous in light of the Bush administration’s long record of Posse Comitatus violations. Since 2001, the Bush administration has accelerated a trend of using the military as a tool in the nation’s domestic affai