The Largest Minority

December 3rd, 2009 by Guest

On November 19th, President Barack Obama wrote a stirring tribute in USA Today to the most famous draft resister in US history, Muhammad Ali. On Tuesday, Obama spoke at West Point, calling for an increase of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, with a speech that recalled the worst shadings of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

On November 19th, Obama wrote about why Ali’s photo hangs over his desk, praising “The Greatest” for “his unique ability to summon extraordinary strength and courage in the face of adversity, to navigate the storm and never lose his way.” On Tuesday, Obama showed neither courage nor strength but the worst kind of imperial arrogance. He asserted America’s right to go into a deeply impoverished country that - from Alexander the Great to the USSR to today - has made clear to the world’s empires that it wants to be left the hell alone.

On Tuesday, Obama summoned the spectre of 9/11 and said, “It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united–bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear.” He didn’t mention how many innocent Afghans had already died in eight years of “horrific attacks” on their homeland or how many would die in the months ahead, defending their own homeland.

On November 19th, Obama praised Ali as “a force for reconciliation and peace around the world.” On Tuesday the Nobel Peace Prize winner, reconciled himself with war.

Would that Muhammad Ali still had his voice. Would that Parkinson’s disease and dementia had not robbed us of his razor-sharp tongue.

Today, Ali has been described as “America’s only living saint.” But like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, both postage stamps before people, Ali has had his political teeth extracted.

But in a time when billions go to war and prisons while 50% of children will be on food stamps for the coming year, we can’t afford Ali, the harmless icon. Maybe Muhammad Ali has been robbed of speech, but I think we can safely guess what the Champ would say in the face of Obama’s war. We can safely guess, because he said it perfectly four decades ago:

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here….. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

Replace Vietnam with Afghanistan and it’s a message Barack Obama and our troops need to hear. But we shouldn’t wait for some celebrity or athlete to make that statement for us. Muhammad Ali may have helped shape the 1960s, but those years of resistance also shaped him. We need to rebuild the movement against war. We need to revive the real Muhammad Ali to inspire draft resistors of the future. We need to reclaim Ali from warmongers who would use his image to sell a war that will create more orphans than peace. This is the struggle of our lives and we have the Nobel-minted President of the United States on the other side of the barricades. Barack Obama can have the fawning media, the oadring generals, the RNC, and the liberal apologists on his side.

But he can’t have the Champ. Remove that poster from your wall Mr. President. Your Ali privileges have been revoked.

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October 13th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

I suppose we should not begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, though it represents a radical break in tradition, since he’s only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the world for years.

Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906 as reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines. Senator George Hoar’s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt’s eligibility for the Peace Prize:

“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”

TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and portions of Pakistan.

People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, albeit Norwegian. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.

It’s dawning even on those predisposed to like the guy that when it comes to burning issues the first black president of the United States truly hates to come down on one side or the other. He dreads making powerful people mad. He won’t stand up for his own people when they’re being savaged by the nutball right, edges them out, then has his press secretary claim that they jumped of their own accord. This may impress the peaceniks of Oslo, but from the American perspective he’s looking like a wimp.

Obama’s Afghan policy evolved on the campaign trail last year as a one-liner designed to deflect charges that he was a peacenik on Iraq. Not so, he cried. The Global War on Terror was being fought in the wrong place. His pledge was to hunt down and “kill” Osama bin Laden.

Once ensconced in the Oval Office Obama, invoking “bipartiship”, instantly nailed a white flag to the mast by keeping on Robert Gates, Bush’s secretary of defense.

He formed a foreign policy team mostly composed of Clinton-era neo-liberal hawks, headed by Hilary Clinton and Richard Holbrook. His next step was to eject the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, and install Gen. Stanley McChrystal, best known for running the assassination wing of the military’s joint special-operations command. (JSOC). Then he ordered 17,000 new US troops to be deployed to Afghanistan.

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June 30th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement regarding the announcement that U.S. troops have left the cities and towns of Iraq and turned over formal security to Iraqi security forces.

“The withdrawal of some U.S. combat troops from Iraq’s cities is welcome and long overdue news. However, it is important to remember that this is not the same as a withdrawal of U.S. troops and contractors from Iraq.

“U.S. troop combat missions throughout Iraq are not scheduled to end until more than a year from now in August of 2010. In addition, U.S. troops are not scheduled for a complete withdrawal for another two and a half years on December 31, 2011. Rather, U.S. troops are leaving Iraqi cities for military bases in Iraq. They are still in Iraq, and they can be summoned back at any time.

“This is not a great victory for peace. On May 19, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Iraqi and U.S. military officials virtually redrew the city limits of Baghdad in order to consider the Army’s Forward Operating Base Falcon as outside the city, despite every map of Baghdad clearly showing it with in city limits. In fact, according to Section 24.3 of the “SOFA” U.S. troops can remain at any agreed upon facility. The reported reason for this decision is to ensure U.S. troops are able to ‘help maintain security in south Baghdad along what were the fault lines in the sectarian war.’

“This troop movement should not be confused with a troop withdrawal from Iraq. In reality, this is a small step toward Iraqi sovereignty as Iraqi security forces begin assuming greater control over security operations, but it is a long way from independence and a withdrawal of the U.S. military presence.”

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via AlterNet

May 27th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Any speech in which President Obama announces a change in policy follows the same basic format of denouncing Bush’s policy, taking long thoughtful pauses, then adopting Bush’s policy.

When I was campaigning for Nader, on the rare occasion that I would meet a self-described liberal calm enough to engage in a conversation with me, they would state that they were voting for Obama because they didn’t want a clone of George W. Bush (meaning John McCain) to win the White House. I would often reply that I wasn’t voting for either McCain or Obama for the very same reason. Both men were outright fascists. Of course, stating something like that would often end the conversation. What an absurd thing to say. Right?

h/t FireDogLake

May 23rd, 2009 by Manila Ryce

During a speech in which he attempted to justify the future illegality of his administration, President Obama also committed a crime against logic by setting forth a false compromise often used by moderate progressives to justify their lack of backbone. After criticizing the far-right for their authoritarian policies and prideful ignorance, the president then surmised that those on the exact opposite end of the political spectrum must also be incorrect, therefor leaving the only sane position to be the compromised one in the middle. There is an idiotic inclination in American journalism and politics to be “fair and balanced” by insisting that the truth to any debate must be in the middle even when one side is clearly wrong.

Using that fallacious argument, Obama could have very well said, “On one side of the spectrum there are those who insist that the world is 6,000 years old, and on the other end of the spectrum we have ideologues who insist that the world is 4.5 billion years old. Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right. The American people are not ideologues. They know that the answer lies somewhere in between these two dates.”

Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is not happy that President Obama has labeled him an “absolutist” for defending the rule of law. Ratner also rightly criticizes the president for being too weak on matters like Guantanamo. He states: “It’s pretty remarkable to me that he would equate on one side the Cheney et al. people who advocate torture, continuing people at Guantanamo, continuing military commissions, having preventive detention, all of those types of depredations of the constitution, and then put us on the other extreme, saying we’re extreme also or absolutist because we actually want the rule of law. It seems to me that that equation is pretty false and outrageous.“

May 23rd, 2009 by Manila Ryce

After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon’s custody more horrific than anything made public so far. “If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse,” Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse.

Hersh gave a speech last week to the ACLU making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in the prison, and the Pentagon has tape of it. The speech was first reported in a New York Sun story last week, which was in turn posted on Jim Romenesko’s media blog, and now EdCone.com and other blogs are linking to the video. We transcribed the critical section here (it starts at about 1:31:00 into the ACLU video.) At the start of the transcript here, you can see how Hersh was struggling over what he should say:

“Debating about it, ummm … Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

“It’s impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai I was very troubled like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers and so we’re dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will. You know there’s enough out there, they can’t (Applause). …. So it’s going to be an interesting election year.”

Notes from a similar speech Hersh gave in Chicago in June were posted on Brad DeLong’s blog. Rick Pearlstein, who watched the speech, wrote: “[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, ‘You haven’t begun to see evil…’ then trailed off. He said, ‘horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.’ He looked frightened.”

So, there are several questions here: Has Hersh actually seen the video he described to the ACLU, and why hasn’t he written about it yet? Will he be forced to elaborate in more public venues now that these two speeches are getting so much attention, at least in the blogosphere? And who else has seen the video, if it exists — will journalists see and report on it? did senators see these images when they had their closed-door sessions with the Abu Ghraib evidence? — and what is being done about it?

(Update: A reader brought to our attention that the rape of boys at Abu Ghraib has been mentioned in some news accounts of the prisoner abuse evidence. The Telegraph and other news organizations described “a videotape, apparently made by US personnel, is said to show Iraqi guards raping young boys.” The Guardian reported “formal statements by inmates published yesterday describe horrific treatment at the hands of guards, including the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy by an army translator.”)

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May 18th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

This video is of course an actor’s recreation of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler’s famous speech in which he denounced American imperialism carried out under the guise of spreading democracy. Sadly, little has changed since then.

May 14th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

The Obama administration said it would seek to block a court-ordered release of photographs which depict what US personnel actually do overseas. This is a major reversal of Obama’s promise over three weeks ago in which he stated that he would not oppose the release of the photos.

The president claimed that the photos would “further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.” Funny, I thought an imperialist foreign policy was what inflamed anti-American sentiment and that forcing Americans to occupy those “anti-American” countries was what actually put them in danger. It’s our actions that actually need to change if we’re to curb anti-American sentiment. Disclosure of these embarrassing photos could actually help our image by showing the world we’re making a break with the past.

Lets take a further look at the president’s claim that the publication of these photos will unarguably “put our troops in danger”. According to Donald Rumsfeld, as horrific and disgusting as the photos from Abu-Gharib prison were, they were just a small percentage of the photos and tapes that existed. They were actually the least offensive photos of the bunch - those deemed safe for public consumption. And yet as shocking as photos of sexual and physical abuse were to the American public in 2004, their reception was fairly low-key in Iraq because Iraqis already knew what was happening. The photos were tame in comparison to their everyday reality and what they’ve already heard. There was no surge in anti-American sentiment beyond that which already existed from the actual acts themselves. Simply put, President Obama’s justification for secrecy doesn’t hold up. The rest of the world already knows what we’ve done. It’s the American public that he’s trying to keep ignorant.

The president additionally stated that “the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.” Now there’s an interesting motivation for withholding information. President Obama has declared that disclosure won’t benefit anyone. That seems like an oddly familiar line of reasoning. Does the president really have the authority to decide what we can and can’t publish? Is he declaring himself “The Decider”?

Executive Director of the ACLU Anthony D. Romero stated, “The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government. This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department’s failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.”

Like all imperialits, Obama is not concerned with the safety of American soldiers. If he was he’d bring them home where they actually would be out of harm’s way. No, the president is much less concerned with the lives of the proletariat and much more concerned with blocking the exposure of the criminality of the government. The more he discloses, the more likely it is that fellow members of the ruling elite will be prosecuted (including members of his own party like Pelosi). That would be a dangerous precedent for an administration that has decided to continue many of the same crimes of their predecessors - including criminal wars and domestic spying.

The Obama administration is not appealing to us with any new argument that the Bush administration didn’t already put forth, and should therefor not be treated any differently by liberals and human rights advocates than the previous administration. We must have the same tenacity for justice when faced with the same obstacles. In a democracy, citizens have the right to know what is being done in their name and officials do not have the right to withholding information they deem inappropriate.

While the entire world has been demanding prosecution of the Bush administration, Obama has simply stated that we need to “look forward” and not go down the dangerous path of accountability. Self-described pragmatists (aka apologists) argue that if we did our whole damn government might be behind bars. Not such a bad thing in my opinion.