The more things change the more they stay the same.

Gates says we have to stop the Taliban in Afghanistan or they will be a problem elsewhere.

Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon say we have to stop the Communists in Vietnam or they will be a problem elsewhere.

Same thing just different bogeyman

Please remember this is the real reason we [...]]]>

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Gates says we have to stop the Taliban in Afghanistan or they will be a problem elsewhere.

Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon say we have to stop the Communists in Vietnam or they will be a problem elsewhere.

Same thing just different bogeyman

Please remember this is the real reason we are in Afghanistan.

And here is an analysis of how powerless our President and all of us are to change the road we are on by the “Father of Reaganomics”.

2 Comments

• At December 2, 2009, John democracyforvancouver.org wrote:

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdjUIwA2IR8

• At December 3, 2009, John democracyforvancouver.org wrote:

  Weird to be agreeing with Representative Baird of late after disagreeing on most everything he did over the last few years.

  His remarks on the Palestinian situation, his vote on the health care bill and now expressing his criticism of the Vietnam-like escalation of our troop level in Afghanistan indicate he truly does stand up for what he believes rather than tow the party line:

  Baird expresses skepticism over Obama's plan for Afghanistan

  But his remarks concerning the Schiavo affair, his Bankruptcy Bill vote and his flip-flop on Iraq will not soon be forgotten nor forgiven.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0cf5If3cNg

Bail out the rich.  Fail to regulate corporations.  Allow unconstrained corporate compensation agreements.  Do not facilitate unionization of workers.  Allow big corporations to control the media.  Make free trade more important than our manufacturing industries.  Ignore environmental priorities.  Keep taxes low.  Deficit spend on the military.  Constrain health care and infrastructure expenditures.

And expect things to get better.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFeENNoqOtI

Israel is assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists as part of its efforts to disrupt the Islamist regime’s illicit weapons program, the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday quoted Western intelligence sources as saying. … The paper also quoted United States intelligence sources as saying Israel is using sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the Islamist republic’s illicit weapons program [...]]]>
Another example of Israeli exceptionalism:

Israel is assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists as part of its efforts to disrupt the Islamist regime’s illicit weapons program, the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday quoted Western intelligence sources as saying.
…
The paper also quoted United States intelligence sources as saying Israel is using sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the Islamist republic’s illicit weapons program as an alternative to direct military strikes.

The British daily said Israel’s Mossad espionage agency was rumored to be behind the death of Ardeshire Hassanpour, a top nuclear scientist at Iran’s Isfahan uranium plant, who died in mysterious circumstances from a reported “gas poisoning” in 2007.

Other recent deaths of important figures in the procurement and enrichment process in Iran and Europe have been the result of Israeli “hits”, intended to deprive Tehran of key technical skills at the head of the program, according to analysts.

…[T]he new U.S. administration is unlikely to sanction an air attack on Iran’s nuclear installations and that President Barack Obama’s offer to extend a hand of peace to Tehran puts any direct military action beyond reach for now.
…
“Disruption is designed to slow progress on the program, done in such a way that they don’t realize what’s happening. You are never going to stop it,” a former CIA officer on Iran told the newspaper.

“The goal is delay, delay, delay until you can come up with some other solution or approach. We certainly don’t want the current Iranian government to have those weapons. It’s a good policy, short of taking them out militarily, which probably carries unacceptable risks,” the official said.

Can you imagine the outcry if Saddam Hussein had poisoned scientists working at Los Alamos, or if Kim Jong Il had ordered the kidnapping of South Korean nuclear physicists? We would consider either an overt act of war.

A few imprecise and rarely fatal rockets that are barely more than toys when measured against the U.S.-funded Israeli arsenal are shot out of Gaza, the Israelis go batshit and kill 1,500 civilians, and the U.S. government calls it justified self-defense. The worldwide intelligence consensus is that Iran’s nuclear weapons program ceased in 2003, but Israeli extrajudicial assassinations of Iranian scientists is met with less than a shrug. “You are never going to stop it.” Funny how that’s never our attitude when it’s an Arab or a Muslim claiming self-defense.

Is it any wonder the whole of the Arab world despises Israel, and considers the U.S. position as an “honest broker” in any Israel/Palestine peace process to be a sick joke?

From Neely’s account given to the Guantanamo Testimonials Project of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas:

…As far as the Geneva Convention, we were told the reason [...]]]>
Because young soldiers like Specialist Brandon Neely will be counting on us to make certain that they are never put into the position of being this government’s torture tools again.

From Neely’s account given to the Guantanamo Testimonials Project of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas:

…As far as the Geneva Convention, we were told the reason we had to live in an old trash dump in tents was due to the fact we could only live one step above the detainees. I did not understand this, as we were told on numerous occasions they did not fall under the Geneva Convention.
…
The only thing I can recall being told about the detainees that would arrive was that they were captured fighting the Americans in Afghanistan. And that they were known terrorists. And that many of them helped in the planning of the 9/11 attacks. We would be coming face-to-face with the worst people the world had to offer.
…
But, as the months went on, one or two of us would actually question what was going on here, the way the detainees were being treated and if they were actually terrorists or not, but being no-ones, and young, and dumb, we never questioned anything further; just did our time until we went home.

* * *
Marine humvees with .50 caliber guns mounted on them led the bus to the camp…

You could hear the Marines screaming at them “Shut the fuck up! You’re property of the United States of America now.” We were not allowed to step onto the bus. The Marines would push them towards us down the bus stairs and we would catch them. The first person who got off the bus, I will never forget. It was a man with one leg. He was later called Stumpy by everyone… Grabbed by the escorting MPs, Stumpy was jumping on one leg, MPs screaming at him to walk faster towards the holding area when, from inside the bus, someone threw his prosthetic leg out onto the ground. Myself and my partner were next. The second detainee came off the bus. We grabbed him like we were trained and took him into the holding area, yelling at him to get on his knees and to shut up.
…
I am not a totally innocent person as far as what happened inside the wire. I am very ashamed to admit it and tell you that I was involved in the very first [Internal Reaction Force] incident at Camp X-Ray…

On the first day we had been taking detainees from the in-processing center to their cages for quite a while when myself and the guy that was my escorting partner grabbed the next detainee to be taken. He was an older man… I noticed he was really tense, shaking really bad, and not wanting to walk or move without being forced to do so. We made our way to Alpha Block to the cage he would be placed in. He was instructed to go to his knees, which he did. My partner then went down and took off his leg shackles. I still had control of his upper body, and I could still feel him tensing up. Once the shackles were off my partner started to take off the hand cuffs. The detainee got really tense and started to pull away. We yelled at him a couple times “Stop moving!” Over and over. Then he stopped moving, and when my partner went to put the key in that first handcuff, the detainee jerked hard to the left towards me. Before I knew it, I threw the detainee to the ground and was on top of him holding his face to the cement floor.

At this time my partner had left the cage. The block NCOIC (or Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge) was on the radio yelling code red which meant emergency on the block. Before I knew, I was being grabbed from behind and pulled out of the cage by the IRF team. They grabbed this man and hog-tied him. He laid there like that for hours that day before he was released from that position.

A couple days later I found out from a detainee who was on that block that the older detainee was just scared and that when we placed him on his knees he thought he was going to be executed. He then went on to tell me that this man had seen some of his friends and family members executed on their knees. I can remember guys coming up to me after it was over that night and said “Man, that was a good job; you got you some”.

I did not feel good about what I did. It felt wrong. This man was old enough to be my father, and I had just beaten up on him. I still to this day don’t know who was more scared before and during this incident me or the detainee.

I remember seeing him the next day when I walked into camp. His face was all bruised and scraped up. I was young and didn’t question anything back then. As I do nowadays. But even then, when I was as pissed off as anyone there, I felt ashamed of what I did. As the years have went on and the more I learn the more guilt I feel. This is one of the incidents from my time at Guantanamo that haunts me.

* * *
There are a couple things that I remember seeing first-hand that come to my mind and that I believe were totally unjust and just plain abuse. I am not sure of the dates or times when they occurred, but it wasn’t too long into the beginning of Camp X-Ray.

One night I was assigned to Charlie Block as a block guard. The medic was handing medication out on the block. He made his way over to one detainee on the block and instructed him to drink a can of Ensure (a lot of detainees were given this since they were underweight and malnourished). The detainee refused to take the Ensure… The [Officer In Charge] then made his way to the block … and the conclusion was that the detainee could not refuse any medications at all…

The call was made on the radio for the IRF team… The detainee just stood there, facing the IRF team. BOOM! the Number One Man hit the detainee with shield causing him to fall to the cement floor of the cage. Quickly the whole team was on top of the detainee. I could not see exactly what they were doing. They stood him up and hand-cuffed him to fence in the cage. The person who had the shield held the detainee’s head so he could not move. The medic then entered the cage with the can of Ensure. Once he entered the cage he looked up and saw me. He then motioned for me to move over to my left (his right). So I moved over. I did not think anything about it. He then opened the Ensure can, grabbed the detainee by the neck, and started to pour it down his throat. The detainee was attempting to move his head, and he wouldn’t swallow any of it. The Ensure just ran down his face all over him.

The medic looked up one quick time and punched the detainee twice on the left side of his face with his right fist. The medic then just turned around and walked out of the cage like nothing happened. The detainee was then un-handcuffed from the cage and laid down on the cement in the cage. He was then hog-tied. He laid in this position for a couple hours.

When the whole incident was over I turned around and noticed the guard tower where the Marines were stationed watching over and realized that the medic had placed me in front of the view of the tower and I had not even realized it.

I later learned through other detainees on the block the reason the man refused the Ensure was that he thought he was being poisoned.

* * *
One day, while on duty at Camp X-Ray, I was assigned to escorting duties… On this day the call came for the IRF team to come to Bravo Block… The situation on the block was that a detainee had called a female MP “bitch” a couple times. For punishment, the IRF team was called upon to enter the cage and hog-tie the detainee. The female MP was very upset, yelling “Whip his ass!”

The IRF team, along with the camp OIC, approached the detainee’s cage and told him to stop yelling and lay down so he could be restrained. The detainee … went to his knees and placed his hands on the top of his head. The lock was taken off and the cage door was opened. The Number One Man on the IRF team tossed his shield to the side and, with a quick run towards the detainee, hopped in the air and came down on the back of the detainee with his knee (the Number One guy on the IRF team was no small guy). This caused the detainee to fall to the cement floor of the cage with the Number One Man on top of him. Then the whole IRF team was on top of him hitting, punching, and kicking him…

While the IRF team was still on top of the detainee someone yelled for the female MP that was called a bitch. She entered the cage and she punched the detainee a couple times in the head and then left the cage. Everyone in the cage stood up and the detainee laid there cuffed-up but motionless and unresponsive…

Later that night, after we had been off for a while, the IRF team came back from the hospital. They would go on and talk about how they hit and punched the detainee and how they held him down so the female MP could hit him a couple times… [T]he camp OIC of this incident would joke many times about how he never heard his name and “war crimes” in the same sentence so many times in his life.

…No one was reprimanded for what happened.

* * *
When an IRFing took place a camera was supposed to be present to capture the IRFing. Every time I witnessed an IRFing a camera was present, but one of two things would happen: (1) the camera would never be turned on, or (2) the camera would be on, but pointed straight at the ground. In the incident on Bravo Block I spoke about I found out through talking to people and hearing them joke that the video of the incident was destroyed.
* * *
When new detainees arrived to the camp, a detainee on Alpha Block began to yell so loudly that you could hear him all over camp. Every time we would take a new detainee to Alpha Block he would get even louder. Eventually, the IRF team was called in to restrain this detainee… By the time the IRF team was coming off the block and I was walking back towards Alpha Block I noticed a couple of the guys had blood on their arms, hands, and uniforms. They were washing their hands with water. The detainee was escorted off the block to medical, where he was given stitches for multiple lacerations to his head. Later that day I came back on the block and saw the cage this detainee was IRFed in. The cement floor was a dull red color from the blood. You could tell at one point before it was washed out that there was a lot of blood on the floor of that cage.

* * *
Everything in the Camp changed once the [International Committee of the Red Cross] showed up. At first detainees were not allowed to talk or get up and walk around inside their cages. They were not even allowed to cover themselves up when they used the bathroom in their buckets. They were told to sit in the middle of the cage unless told otherwise or face punishment. They did not even know where they were at. They would ask and we would just lie to them and tell them they were in Russia or some other place. Many times they would ask about what happened to their country, and many of the soldiers including myself at times would tell them their country was destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Once the ICRC came they were told where they were at, allowed to talk, allowed to get up and walk around. The chain of command was really careful when the ICRC was around.

* * *
I don’t believe the IRF team was used for the right reasons at all. At least the people on the team used it for the wrong reasons. It was their way to beat up on someone who was smaller and weaker than them. I have often wondered why you would need 5 healthy, grown men, in riot gear, to go take a down a detainee who was most likely underweight and very weak.
…
Upon arrival, detainees were screamed at throughout the whole process. They were told to shut up, walk faster, and what not. Some guards would call them “Sand Niggers.” I never heard that phrase until I was at Guantanamo. Detainees would be told that their country had been nuked and nothing was left, and that their families were dead. I know of some guards even telling detainees they could be executed at any time. This all was being said on the blocks by fellow MPs.
….
Just because many of us were guards at Guantanamo does not make us automatically bad people. I know for a fact one or two people, including myself, felt sorry for these people–and very ashamed of what we were taking part in. But what could we say? If we questioned anything or talked out against what we thought was wrong, we would have been ridiculed. And who knows what else we would have had to face. So we kept our mouths shut and went work every day, counting down the days until we could return home to our families and just could forget about this time we spent in Guantanamo.
…
I also want it to be known that we were told by the United States Army that, if we did not sign this piece of paper that stated we would not talk to the press, write a book, or make a movie, we could not leave and go back home. This happened the day before we left.
…
I often think of the detainees who have been released or continue to be caged there like animals. I don’t think people realize these caged individuals’ lives have been changed forever. The innocent people who were wrongfully held have lost so much. Some of them have lost family members, jobs, and money. And for what? No matter what happens in their future, they will not be able to get that lost time back that we took from them.

… President Barack Obama has said the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay will be closed within a year. That’s great, but what are WE as the United States of America, the people who kidnapped and tortured these people going to do for them? Just send them home like nothing happened? In the USA if you are sentenced to prison and later on you are found not to be guilty through DNA or what not you are given compensation. Are we going to give compensation to these individuals that were so wrongfully held for so many years? We should. We started this mess and it’s time we attempt to help this people move on with their lives. The sad part of this all is the people who are responsible. Former President George Bush and Former Vice President Dick Cheney will never be held accountable for the decisions they made. It’s the detainees and the guards like myself that will have to live every day with what they went through, saw, and did while there.

I don’t understand those who say we should only look forward, especially as so many of them are the most avid supporters of Israel, which would not exist but for the collective guilt of a world that closed its eyes to the Holocaust until after 6 million were dead.

All of the industrialized nations of the earth are responsible for what has happened at Guantanamo, because none of them did anything beyond speaking out against this crime against humanity. None of these countries used the slightest bit of military or legal or political leverage to force BushCo’s hand and stop the detention or torture of even a single individual. Even Sweden – Sweden! – took an active role in the U.S. “extraordinary rendition” program.

Obama does not want to look vengeful or retributive – or, perish the thought, weak – by standing up against the imperialistic tendencies that made us an international pariah during the Bush/Cheney tenure.

President Obama, closing Guantanamo and repudiating torture are not enough.

In order to truly rehabilitate this country, and to once again make these war crimes the hallmarks of only dictators and thugs, we must prove that we recognize the absolute immorality and illegality (not to mention unconstitutionality) of torture, extraordinary rendition, detention without charge and extrajudicial punishment.

Just as there should never again be a victim abused like Mamdouh Habib, there should never again be a soldiers misused like Brandon Neely.

The latest fighting overshadowed a visit to Israel where the secretary general was supposed to be exploring efforts to establish a ceasefire in Gaza.

In some of the most intense ground combat of the 20-day-old assault on Gaza, Israeli tanks powered into the southern suburb of Tel el Howa clashing with Palestinian [...]]]> Will Obama’s U.N. Ambassador abstain on a war crimes vote on this?

The latest fighting overshadowed a visit to Israel where the secretary general was supposed to be exploring efforts to establish a ceasefire in Gaza.

In some of the most intense ground combat of the 20-day-old assault on Gaza, Israeli tanks powered into the southern suburb of Tel el Howa clashing with Palestinian militants firing rockets.

The tanks advanced under a barrage of artillery and mortar fire that struck the al Quds, al Fata and al Wafa hospitals.

There were unconfirmed reports that Shifa, Gaza City’s biggest hospital, was on fire after being struck by Israeli shells.

Israel has repeatedly claimed Hamas commanders are hiding in Shifa although it has provided no evidence to support this.

A tower block housing various media groups including the Gaza offices of Reuters was shelled, injuring two employees of an Arabic television network.

The French government issued a forthright condemnation of Israel’s actions.

“We condemn in the strongest terms the bombings this morning by the Israeli army of several hospitals and a building housing international media in Gaza city,” Eric Chevallier, spokesman for the French foreign ministry in Paris, said.

“We condemn with equal strength the bombing that hit the headquarters of the UN in Gaza, injuring three staff members.

[U.N. Secretary General] Ban said Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, had assured him the incident had been “a grave mistake” which was being taken “very seriously”.

“He assured me that extra caution will be given to UN facilities and stuff and that this will not be repeated,” he said.

Shifa Hospital is where Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert has been working during the current Israeli assault on Gaza:

I think it’s important to understand that the most devastating weapon they are currently using is actually the siege of Gaza, which has been on for eighteen months, which means a lot of starvation, lack of food, water, power supplies, medicines, napkins, anything that people need to live. So it’s one-and-a-half million people who basically is now without their absolutely necessary means for living their lives, and that is, of course, illegal.
…
When it comes to the DIME [dense inert metal explosive] weapons, we have seen a substantial number of amputations, where the amputees do not have shrapnel injuries. On the contrary, they have torn apart their legs, often one or two or even three limbs, their arm also. Some of them are beyond salvage, because the amputations are so high and so fierce that it also affects the lower part of the body. Some are survivable. But typical for these amputations is that there is no sign of metal fragments or shrapnel..

The additional effect in animal studies on the DIME weapon is that the residuals in the muscle in mice will cause a very severe form of muscle cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma, which easily spreads to the lungs. This remains to be shown.

In case they weren’t successful killing you the first time around.

Back to Dr. Gilbert:

The condition in Shifa Hospital and in the other hospitals in Gaza is horrifying. I’ve been to Gaza for the last ten years, in and out, teaching and training people in the medical field. I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, all windows in the Shifa Hospital are out, due to the bombing of the mosque across the street. They have very unstable electricity. They lack supplies, disposables, surgical equipment, trolleys, beds even. They have a fantastic staff, who are working heroically to save their patients, but we have been doing surgery with, almost regularly, two patients in each OR, on the wall, on the floor, in the corridors. The lifts are barely working. The ICU had to triple its capacity with makeshift ICUs.

It is really, truly a scene from Dante’s Inferno. It is these loads of patients coming in. We had 120, 130 patients coming a day, children, women. And I would say approximately 90 percent—I repeat, 90 percent—of the killed and injured that we have seen are civilians. Up ’til yesterday, 971 people have been killed; of them, one of three is a child below eighteen. 4,500 injuries, as of yesterday at 4:00; among them, every second is a woman or a child. So this is really targeting civilian Palestinian population. And we had a large number of pediatric cases with head injuries, with complicated fractures—

This is your foreign policy on Bush.

Five more days…

The European Union remains [...]]]>
Bush’s Alfred E. Neuman impersonation is costing dozens of lives daily. Yes, we have only one president at a time, but I would feel a bit better if Obama stood up and said, “The carnage in Gaza is appalling, and I have asked President Bush to do all he can to stop it in his remaining weeks in office.”

The European Union remains incapable of persuading Israel to halt its war on Hamas and fill a gaping diplomatic vacuum as the world awaits a new U.S. president, experts said Tuesday.

As the conflict rages in the impoverished Gaza Strip, the EU has continued to do what it has always done best — offer humanitarian aid — but has been unable to fill the void as it holds no political leverage over U.S. ally Israel.

With a troika of envoys just leaving, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy still in the Middle East, the EU is showing “energy and creativity,” according to a Norwegian diplomat who helped negotiate the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

“But I think we also have to be aware of some facts of reality,” said the diplomat, Jan Egeland, who now heads the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

He said the United States “is duty-bound to push, and broker, and facilitate with all their might and influence over Israel” to push any peace efforts forward.

“The EU is in all my evening prayers,” he said. “We hope that they can broker something but … I don’t see the EU being able to make either Israel or Hamas change their behaviour.”

He insisted that only coordinated international pressure led by Washington, but including Russia and China, on the main regional players — Israel, Egypt and Iran — could really be efficient.

Janes Defense Weekly is estimating that Israel will stop its offensive within 10 days. Nice that they’re keeping the slaughter to a tight political schedule.

This murderous rampage will end up just like Lebanon in 2006: hundreds and perhaps thousands dead among those on the receiving end of Israel’s wrath, a few Israeli casualties, and only greater support for militants in Gaza.

Either the Israelis are incredibly stupid, or politics has once again trumped human life.

And, once again, Bush is handmaiden to an illegal war on illegally occupied ground.

Nir Rosen in The Guardian:

An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for [...]]]>

Nir Rosen in The Guardian:

An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

If you think this is just rhetoric, remember what Tom Friedman had to say about the war on Iraq: that someone had to pay for 9/11, an example had to be made, and Iraq was the easiest and most “target rich” enemy of choice to get the American people lathered up against.

I have often wondered why Israel didn’t take the Hamas route with the Palestinians: schools, healthcare and jobs can go a long way toward co-opting “insurgents” (read: the civilian occupied, unhappy with their occupiers), and they’re a helluva lot cheaper than planes and bombs.

But then I wake up and remember that Israel is the #1 recipient of U.S. aid, and most of that aid is in the form of quid pro quo to defense contractors.

Hooray, American Capitalism! Killing innocents under the Stars and Stripes since – forever!

1 Comments

• At January 2, 2009, John cpajohn.com wrote:

  Just read this article which does a good job of pointing out that it is not necessarily the people of the United States or Israel that support the actions of the United States and Israeli governments.

I just heard on the radio that that DLC quisling Rahm Emanuel is Obama’s likely choice for Chief of Staff. Crap.

While my opinion doesn’t mean squat, here’s my dream cabinet, which includes promoting FEMA back to cabinet level (and taking it out of Dept. of Homeland Security):

Department of Agriculture: Senator Tom Harkin Department of Commerce: Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon Department of [...]]]>

I just heard on the radio that that DLC quisling Rahm Emanuel is Obama’s likely choice for Chief of Staff. Crap.

While my opinion doesn’t mean squat, here’s my dream cabinet, which includes promoting FEMA back to cabinet level (and taking it out of Dept. of Homeland Security):

Department of Agriculture: Senator Tom Harkin
Department of Commerce: Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon
Department of Defense: General Wesley Clark
Department of Education: Geoffrey Canada
Department of Energy: Angelina Galiteva
Federal Emergency Management Agency: Jane A. Bullock
Department of Health and Human Services: Former Oregon Governor – and author of the Oregon Health Plan – Dr. John Kitzhaber
Department of Homeland Security: Domestic Terrorism expert Morris Dees
Department of Housing and Urban Development: National Urban League president Marc Morial
Department of the Interior: former Alaska Governor Tony Knowles
Department of Justice: Andrew Cuomo
Department of Labor: SEIU president Andy Stern
Department of State: New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson
Department of Transportation: Outgoing Chair of the American Public Transportation Association Michael S. Townes
Department of Treasury: anyone but Larry Summers
Department of Veterans Affairs: Tammy Duckworth

Who would be in your dream cabinet?

What are your priorities for an Obama administration? Mine are, in no particular order because they are all of critical importance:

(1) Get out of Iraq.

(2) Use undispersed portion of the $700 billion bailout for transportation and renewable energy infrastructure projects as economic stimulus.

(3) Repeal FISA law changes.

(4) Repeal the Military Commissions Act.

(5) Repeal new FBI guidelines for “intelligence gathering.”

(6) Remove ban on gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.

(7) Close Guantanamo and release all prisoners not charged with any crime.

(8) Get started on universal health care.

(9) Undertake prosecution for fraud, where appropriate, in the banking, mortgage brokerage and insurance industries and bond rating agencies; direct any civil fines levied into a program to help homeowners at risk of foreclosure.

(10) Remove the gag order from all family planning funding, both domestic and international, and allow family planning funding for groups that also provide contraception and abortion services; fully de-fund abstinence-only education and re-direct these funds into complete family planning and human sexuality education.

(11) Repeal Bush tax cuts.

1 Comments

• At November 5, 2008, John d4v.org wrote:

  My laundry list is more what some would call "unrealistic" but I think you have to start at the source of the problems.

  I'd take a platform from Kucinich and establish a Department of Peace.

  Disband Homeland Security.

  I would push legislation that requires all elections officials to be elected in nonpartisan races rather than appointed, require all elections to have paper ballots and outlaw voter purging.

  Push legislation for public financing of campaigns and instant run-off voting in all national, state and local elections.

  Appoint new FCC commissioners who support re-instituting the previous bans on too much concentration of media ownership and the equal time rule.

  Repeal the Patriot Act.

  Re-institute the Glass-Steagall act and tighten up bank leverage ratios. Force banks to divest into smaller entities to reduce the "too big to fail problem".

  Make it explicitly illegal for a President to execute signing statements and disobey any existing or future legislation passed by Congress. Take steps (not sure what they would be) to ensure the Department of Justice is never again used as a political tool of the White House.

  Remove tax deductibility for compensation paid to an individual (with no exceptions like we presently have in the tax law) in excess of $1 million annually (indexed for inflation) and add a 5% corporate tax surcharge to wages paid in excess of this amount. Use the funds to help pay for lower college tuitions.

  I would appoint at least one Republican cabinet member, Chuck Hagel would be a good pick.

  Do something creative to punish corporations who outsource employees.

  Limit Supreme Court judges terms to 15 or 20 years.

  Once the above is done, I would turn to energy, global warming, healthcare, tax reform, redirect military spending into programs that help foreign countries reduce their propensity to breed terrorists (let's kill them with our kindness instead of killing them) and the many other issues that must be addressed.

As Aziz Huq wrote in his piece published at truthout yesterday, the financial meltdown currently being experienced on Wall Street and in the Federal Treasury may be the start of unwinding another complicated and ill-considered U.S. investment strategy: our military presence in almost every country on earth.

Even before the mid-September unraveling began, international creditor goodwill toward the “sole superpower” and its fiscal [...]]]>

As Aziz Huq wrote in his piece published at truthout yesterday, the financial meltdown currently being experienced on Wall Street and in the Federal Treasury may be the start of unwinding another complicated and ill-considered U.S. investment strategy: our military presence in almost every country on earth.

Even before the mid-September unraveling began, international creditor goodwill toward the “sole superpower” and its fiscal overreach seemed to be evaporating fast. Asian investors, for instance, were quick to evince “unprecedented” skepticism about U.S. assets in the opening moments of the crisis…

Since September, however, the same sovereign wealth funds have proved skittish indeed about helping U.S. financial outfits, thus eliminating another possible resource for responding to credit shortfalls.

At some point, tighter global credit conditions are sure to significantly constrain America’s freedom of action internationally. After all, Chinese and East Asian investors, to offer but one example, are now quite capable of reining in, and even undermining, the federal government (if they choose to), rather than vice versa.

The United States has always prized individualism, and in the beginning, this extended to avoiding “foreign entanglements” as well, as George Washington warned against in his farewell address. But the expansion across the North American continent not only provided the impetus for excluding other nations from our land- and resource-rich prize, but also granted the U.S. the wealth necessary to defend this prize and to project our power first in the Western hemisphere with the Monroe Doctrine, and then across the Pacific with Manifest Destiny, and finally, after World War II and with the advent of the Cold War, into the many places abandoned by the imperial powers of Europe and Japan. Our alliance with Israel brought further military “investment” in the Middle East; the fall of the Soviet Union opened up Eastern Europe to U.S. troops; and after September 11 the Bush Administration expanded our presence into almost every other vacant spot on the map. Currently, the U.S. military has bases or troops in more than 150 countries.

Power may be the ultimate aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger famously quipped; but the man himself is living proof that power is also a gateway drug to an addiction only satisfied by more, and greater, power.

The U.S. military budget for fiscal 2009 – which does not include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as these continue to be “emergency expenditures” despite the fact that each has now surpassed World War II in duration – is $515 billion dollars, a breathtaking amount considering that it is only for a single year, and that U.S. military expenditures seem to know no direction but “up.” Only Social Security takes more from the U.S. Treasury, and military spending absorbs more tax dollars than Education, Transportation, Veterans, Justice, Natural Resources, Environment, Agriculture, Foreign Affairs, Community Development, Science and Technology, and Government Administration combined.

Is this really the best use of our resources, in a world where we spend more on our military than all of the other nations on the planet – again – combined, and when we are falling behind the rest of the industrialized world in areas as critical as education, infant mortality, and the availability of health care?

On the same day that Aziz Huq published his piece about the inevitable contraction of the American empire, Barrons published a bullish article on the near-term prospects for defense-related stocks, even under an Obama administration:

“It doesn’t really matter” who wins the presidency since both candidates are making defense a priority, says Thomas Nyheim, portfolio manager at Christiana Bank & Trust.

He is overweight defense in part because “a lot of the projects that are on the books have three-year, five-year and 10-year life for their contracts.”

Many defense stocks are hovering near decade-low valuations. Yet, the industry’s annual earnings are expected to climb in the double-digits for the next few years.

In post-9/11 America, “it is political suicide” to even cut a dollar from the defense budget” given the threat of terrorism and increasing geopolitical strife, says Scott Sacknoff, manager of the Spade Defense Index.

The U.S. needs to upgrade and replace military equipment that is either decades old or battered from fighting simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These realities make the overall defense budget fairly bulletproof.

Time will tell.

The last four decades have seen U.S. citizens pulling back, intellectually, from any involvement in the world other than military; our focus has become increasingly parochial, and infamously shallow. This has been nowhere more evident than in our elections, which have been influenced far more by John Kerry’s windsurfing and Bush’s beer-buddy persona than the critical issues now crashing around our ears.

But this latest crisis seems to have woken us from our reverie; we are out of the poppy field and looking critically, if also fearfully, at the issues and the candidates for the first time in decades. September 11 could not keep us sane for more than a few news cycles, but the threat to our livelihoods, our homes, our bank and retirement accounts have proved a stronger antidote to the ether of American Idol and Fox News.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, perhaps the weakening of the absolute power of Wall Street (and the waning appeal of T-Bills worldwide) will force us to look realistically at our position in the world, and come to terms with our deep national need for global dominance.

From Michael Schwartz care of Jon at ATR:

As the Bush administration was entering office in 2000, Donald Rumsfeld exuberantly expressed its grandiose ambitions for Middle East domination, telling a National Security Council meeting: “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond.”

Remember when [...]]]>

From Michael Schwartz care of Jon at ATR:

As the Bush administration was entering office in 2000, Donald Rumsfeld exuberantly expressed its grandiose ambitions for Middle East domination, telling a National Security Council meeting: “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond.”

Remember when the war was going to take less than 6 months, oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction, and it would be raining candy-coated unicorns from Tel Aviv to Tehran?

WASHINGTON, Sept 10 (Reuters) – More oil is needed on the market, not less, the White House said on Wednesday, disagreeing with a surprise decision by OPEC to cut production by about half a million barrels a day.

“We need more supplies on the market, not less,” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said. “Energy prices are still very high, despite their recent decline.”

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries had been expected to keep existing output allocations though some members had voiced concern about a growing surplus of oil on the market as high prices have affected demand.

In the immortal words of Otter in Animal House: “You fucked up. You trusted us.” I would not be in the least surprised if this – taking Iraq’s oil off the market rather than getting the Iraqi taps turned on full blast – was all part of the evil Cheney plan: start a war that puts oil prices through the roof while eventually gaining control of the Iraqi oil fields, and at the same time ramping up political pressure to open up coastal reserves and ANWR to drilling. After all, in 2003 we were almost a quarter century past the Exxon Valdez disaster, which was just about buried in the vast U.S. memory hole.

We “certainly disagree” with [the OPEC] decision, said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, who also urged lawmakers in the U.S. Congress to complete legislation aimed at fostering the production of more energy resources.
…
The House of Representatives is expected to vote on an energy package this week that would open the coasts of at least four Southeastern states to offshore drilling: Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.

Notice that the two states with the most coastline outside of Alaska – and with Republican governors to boot – aren’t included; though both Ahnold and Charlie Crist have offered tepid support for offshore drilling, both know that a single accident could torpedo their states’ respective tourist industries.

So if the Dems were smart they’d throw in Florida and California as a poison pill to kill the legislation. But poison pills are the GOP’s specialty – Reid and Pelosi are too high minded for such underhanded duplicity. And look where it’s gotten us.

Meanwhile, back in the Green Zone, General Petraeus is busy burnishing his legacy, and stoking the Iraq-al Qaeda connection for McCain’s benefit:

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the departing commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said that the country remains “the central front” for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups but acknowledged that violence is rising in Afghanistan and Pakistan — battlegrounds he will soon oversee as the next head of the U.S. military’s Central Command.

Of course, as soon as he takes over in Waziristan, that will become “the central front.” Because he’s The Man.

In an interview Tuesday, hours before President Bush spoke about the need to send more troops to Afghanistan, Petraeus said, “Iraq is still viewed as the central front, if you will, for al-Qaeda and extremism of that flavor.”

Would that be Terrorist Crunch?

Petraeus oversaw the dramatic drop in violence in Iraq that began last summer as the Bush administration deployed 30,000 additional troops here. “We have gone from being on the brink to being on the mend,” he said at his office in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

But what happens when we stop paying the Iraqis not to shoot at us? Nice of the WaPo to neglect pointing that out. Wouldn’t want to question The Man.

But Petraeus said the gains in Iraq are not irreversible. “There are a number of what we call storm clouds in the horizon,” he said.

If there weren’t, then we might be able to withdraw our troops all together. And we can’t have that.

Petraeus said recent intelligence reports suggest that Iranian-backed Shiite fighters who left the country in recent months to avoid a military confrontation with U.S. and Iraqi forces are considering returning to Iraq.

Political tension, particularly over disputed internal boundaries in northern Iraq, had the potential of “erupting into something more significant,” the general said.

Like a casus belli? (Latin for “October surprise.”)

The Iraqi parliament, which reconvened Tuesday after its summer break, failed to pass a law this year to provide a framework for provincial elections that were scheduled to take place next month.

But isn’t that what your oh-so-successful surge was for? To provide “room” for a political solution to Iraq’s ethnic and territorial issues? Where’s the success, Senator McCain?

But as with everything BushCo does, it’s the ends that count. The reason – and the means – are as meaningless as the hundreds of thousands of lives they’ve destroyed to get what they want.

Minneapolis in September, perhaps?

SEOUL, South Korea – Police fired water cannons at thousands of protesters Tuesday as President Bush got a volatile reception in South Korea at the start of his three-nation Asian trip.

Some 18,300 police were on high alert with riot gear and bomb-sniffing dogs to maintain order during Bush’s brief visit, the National Police Agency said. … As evening [...]]]>

Minneapolis in September, perhaps?

SEOUL, South Korea – Police fired water cannons at thousands of protesters Tuesday as President Bush got a volatile reception in South Korea at the start of his three-nation Asian trip.

Some 18,300 police were on high alert with riot gear and bomb-sniffing dogs to maintain order during Bush’s brief visit, the National Police Agency said.
…
As evening approached, an estimated 20,000 anti-Bush protesters gathered nearby. Police turned water cannons on them as they tried to move onto the main central downtown boulevard, telling the crowd that the liquid contained markers to tag them so they could be identified later.

Our allies are so awesome. They torture our prisoners for us and model the latest in crowd control/surveillance techniques.

Bonus Bush stupidity:

“Iraq has changed — a lot — thanks to the bravery of people in this hangar and the bravery of troops all across our country. The terrorists (are) on the run. The terrorists will be denied a safe haven, and freedom is on the march. And as a result, our children are more likely to grow up in a peaceful world.”

For the millionth time, you hairless son of a bald monkey: Al Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq until you opened the door for them; “freedom” is just another word for 1 million civilian dead (and counting); and our children will only be more likely to grow up in a peaceful world once you and your criminal cohort are out of Washington and out of power, forever.

But enjoy your valedictory tour, Dummy – especially since the repression and surveillance activities of the regimes you are visiting have gained so much legitimacy during your tenure.

Asshole.