Americans pay price for speaking out
Dissenters face job loss, arrest, threats;
activists not stopped by backlash
By Kathleen Kenna
Aug. 9— He’s a Vietnam War hero from
a proud lineage of warriors who served the United States, so he never
expected to be called a traitor.
After 39 years in the Marines, including commands in Somalia and Iraq,
Gen. Anthony Zinni never imagined he would be tagged “turncoat.”
The epithets are not from the uniforms but the suits — “senior
officers at the Pentagon,” the now-retired general says from his
home in Williamsburg, Virginia.
“They want to question my patriotism?” he demands testily.
To question the Iraq war in the US — and individuals from Main
St. merchants to Hollywood stars do — is to be branded un-American.
Dissent, once an ideal cherished in the US Constitution’s First
Amendment, now invites media attacks, hate Web sites, threats and job
loss.
After Zinni challenged the administration’s rationale for the Iraq
war last fall, he lost his job as President George W. Bush’s Middle
East peace envoy after 18 months.
“I’ve been told I will never be used by the White House again.”
Across the United States, hundreds of Americans have been arrested for
protesting the war. The American Civil Liberties Union has documented
more than 300 allegations of wrongful arrest and police brutality from
demonstrators at anti-war rallies in Washington and New York.
Even the silent, peaceful vigils of Women in Black — held regularly
in almost every state — have prompted threats of arrest by American
police. [Editors note: See related story, cover]
Actors and spouses Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon have publicly denounced
the backlash against them for their anti-war activism.
Robbins said they were called “traitors” and “supporters
of Saddam” and their public appearances at a United Way luncheon
in Florida and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, this spring
were cancelled in reaction to their anti-war stance.
Actor/comedian Janeane Garofalo was stalked and received death threats
for opposing the war in high-profile media appearances.
MSNBC hosts asked viewers to urge MCI to fire actor and anti-war activist
Danny Glover as a spokesperson — the long-distance telephone giant
refused to fire him despite the ensuing hate-mail campaign — and
one host, former politician Joe Scarborough, urged that anti-war protesters
be arrested and charged with sedition.
“There’s no official blacklisting,” says Kate McArdle,
executive director of Artists United, a new group of 120 actors devoted
to progressive causes.
“This is Hollywood, so there are always rumors starting up. Mostly
it was producers saying, ‘We know your position — do you have
to be so vocal?’“
Internet chat rooms have spouted “tons and tons of vitriol aimed
at us,” says McArdle, a former network TV executive.
“Things like, ‘Tell me where Tim Robbins lives and I’ll
go bash out his brains,’” she says.
“Or, ‘If you don’t like America, why don’t you move
to Iraq? Why don’t you move to Canada?’
“The real backlash comes from the right wing, from America’s
talk radio guys — when their ratings are down — not from the
industry,” McArdle says. “We get the ‘You’re either
with us or agin’ us.’”
Comes with the territory, she adds.
“We’re a nation of dissenters.”
The Dixie Chicks country pop group won worldwide attention for their
anti-Bush comments, which were met with widespread radio station bans
against playing their music. Their fans have responded by circulating
petitions on the Internet objecting to the “chill” that has
tried to silence free speech in the US
And opposition to the war has spawned many new songs — some remixes
of old Vietnam protest songs — and Web sites devoted to anti-war
lyrics.
Dozens of fans walked out of a Pearl Jam concert in Denver, Colo., last
spring when lead singer Eddie Vedder hoisted a Bush mask on a microphone
stand and sang, “He’s not a leader, he’s a Texas leaguer.”
But musician Carlos Santana was cheered in Australia — a key US
ally in the Iraq war and recent proponent of the “Bush doctrine”
of intervention in smaller states’ affairs — when he spoke
against the war and American foreign policy.
West Coast bands are organizing a Bands Against Bush free concert and
rally in Los Angeles this fall to publicize their discontent with American
foreign policy in the Middle East.
Even country singer Merle Haggard, whose song “The Fightin’
Side of Me” was a pro-war anthem in the Vietnam era, penned a protest
against tame media in the wake of the Dixie Chicks controversy.
“That’s The News” has bitter lines like:
Soldiers in the desert sand still clinging to a gun / No one is the
winner and everyone must lose ... / Politicians do all the talking,
soldiers pay the dues / Suddenly the war is over, that’s the news.
Peace scholar Stephen Zunes — so-named for winning a Peace and
Justice Studies Association award for leadership in promoting such scholarship
— says he was recently “uninvited” to speak to the Arizona
state bar association despite a six-month-old commitment.
“It’s censorship” for his perceived anti-Israel views
and outspoken opposition to a foreign policy that has made the US a
target of terrorists, says Zunes from his office at the University of
San Francisco, where he teaches politics. “You’d think lawyers
would be more concerned about civil liberties.”
A recent tour for his new book, Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy
and the Roots of Terrorism, drew “obscenity-filled e-mails
... calling me a traitor” and similar “outrage” on-air
from TV commentators, he says.
“I’ve been called all sorts of names on national TV. It’s
been pretty ugly.
“There are a lot of Americans who don’t want to believe their
government is lying to them. It’s becoming more and more clear
that the American people have been lied to, so I think it’s important
... particularly for intellectuals, to point out those lies.”
Full-page ads in the New York Times — at $37,000 (US) each —
and other high-circulation dailies have been bought by American religious
leaders, actors and a range of wealthy activists to spur anti-war dissent.
Harvard dean Stephen Walt, an international affairs professor, helped
organize such an ad with 32 other security experts at universities from
coast to coast. The wordy ad detailed reasons for fighting terrorism
and not Iraq, unless under direct threat, and warned of increasing Middle
East instability.
Expressions of support came from colleagues at home and overseas, Walt
recalls. “We said you could be against this war without being against
uses of necessary force” elsewhere. “The world is a nasty
place, but this is just stupid.”
The 32 signatories “transcended a lot of the traditional (anti-war)
lines,” says Walt, who admits to disappointment that the Democrat
minority in Congress and Democratic presidential candidates, except
Howard Dean, have been “very slow off the mark” in backing
public dissent over the war.
Non-politicians may fill that gap. MoveOn.org, claiming a membership
of more than a million Americans — and another 700,000 beyond their
borders — is running full-page newspaper ads across the US demanding
an independent inquiry into the apparently exaggerated need for the
Iraq invasion.
“It would be a tragedy if young men and women were sent to die
for a lie,” the ad states below a photo of Bush, tagged “MISleader.”
The ad has drawn about half a million replies after its New York Times
kickoff last month. MoveOn.org, founded in 1998 by California spouses
Joan Blades and Wes Boyd (inventor of the flying toaster screen saver),
already has logged more than 1 million e-mails and calls to Congress
with protests against the war.
Another national ad campaign has been launched by billionaire George
Soros, urging Americans to call Congress and demand a post-war investigation.
“When the nation goes to war, the people deserve the truth,”
the ad states. “American men and women risked and gave their lives
for a war based on fighting an imminent threat to homeland security.
The case for this war — made unequivocally by President Bush and
members of his administration — rested on intelligence that has
been exposed as exaggerated or even false.”
Zinni says he has no regrets about challenging the administration, despite
the disdain of “senior Pentagon officials.”
“I was very, very careful not to say anything once the troops were
on the ground. I worried that I would be accused of not supporting them.”
His father fought in World War I, his cousins in World War II, and his
only brother in Korea. “I’m not anti-war.”
But his speech last fall at the Middle East Institute in Washington
outlined reservations about “the wrong war at the wrong time”
against a tyrant “who could be contained.”
Zinni argued the US risked alienating allies and possibly creating more
enemies if it attacked Iraq without multilateral backing and without
new proof of weapons of mass destruction. Warning “war should always
be a last resort,” he appealed for more weapons inspections, United
Nations support and better post-war planning.
“I wish I was wrong. I don’t feel good about it. I would rather
be wrong,” Zinni says. Still, as evidence appears to mount against
the White House, he adds, “Whatever you take to the people, you
should be accurate. If there is no imminent threat, if it’s not
true, then someone should be held accountable.”
“It’s an obligation you have — in our history there have
been too many times when generals didn’t say what they thought,”
he says. “We all swear an oath to the Constitution. One of the
things I thought I was defending was the right to dissent.”
Source: Toronto Star
Civil rights coalition wants
to ‘save our courts’
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Aug. 5— The oldest and largest
US civil rights coalition has launched a new web site, “Save Our
Courts,” to inform the public about what it calls “extremist”
jurists nominated by the Bush administration to serve on the federal
bench.
“Our freedoms are being threatened by extremist federal judicial
nominees at the circuit and district court levels,” said Wade Henderson
of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) at Monday’s
launch. “The individuals charged with dispensing justice in our
society have a direct impact on all of our rights, as well as on protecting
the environment, workers, and consumers. Our federal judges, who are
appointed for life, must be moderate, fair and impartial. What could
be more important than saving our courts from extremist ideologues?”
The new site, www.SaveOurCourts.org, will be a joint operation by the
LCCR, a coalition of more than 180 organizations including the National
Organization for Women (NOW), the National Coalition of La Raza, and
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
the Communications Consortium Media Center, and Earthjustice, an environmental
group.
The site provides comprehensive information about nominees, as well
as articles, editorials, and op-ed pieces on Bush’s judicial nominees;
grassroots training kits; and links to other organizations that oppose
them, according to Henderson.
While the vast majority of Bush’s judicial nominees have been approved
by the Senate, Democrats have opposed a series of appointments they
consider to be beyond the pale. Four nominees to appeals courts —
Texas judge Priscilla Owen, District of Columbia attorney Miguel Estrada
and Mississippi’s Charles Pickering, and Alabama Attorney General
William Pryor — have been the subject of successful filibusters
by Senate Democrats, who have also announced plans to block California
judge Carolyn Kuhl’s recent nomination to the Ninth Circuit Court
of Appeals based in San Francisco and Michigan judge Henry Saad’s
nomination to the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati.
Before Congress began its August recess last week, Democrats successfully
turned back a Republican-led effort to halt a filibuster against Pryor,
who was nominated to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, when
a vote to close debate on the nomination fell seven votes short of the
60 needed to invoke cloture. Efforts to close debate on the Estrada
and Owen nominations also failed.
The confrontations over the nominees have fueled anger on both sides
of the aisle. Republicans argue that Democrats are should defer to the
president’s wishes, while Democrats insist that the relatively
few candidates they have singled out for opposition are extremists who,
if approved, would be likely to heed their personal convictions at the
expense of accepted law and mainstream views.
Democrats point out more than twice as many of Bush’s judicial
nominees have been confirmed than those nominated by Clinton at a comparable
point in the two presidents’ terms.
Owen, Estrada, and Pickering were first nominated by Bush in the last
Congress. Democrats had hoped that Bush would decline to renominate
them when the current Congress convened in January, so his decision
to put their names forward once again inflamed partisan passions.
Democrats charge that Owen’s strong opposition to abortion rights
and support for business interests over those of labor make her unqualified,
while they have complained about Estrada’s refusal to answer questions
during his confirmation hearings. Pickering is criticized for his views
on abortion and race.
Pryor’s outspoken far-right views on abortion, states’ rights,
and environmental protection have spurred Democrats’ opposition.
He was the first state attorney general to argue that the Endangered
Species and Clean Air Acts violated the US Constitution because such
regulation should be left to the states alone.
“Pryor is the most extreme nominee we have been asked to support,”
said New York Sen. Charles Schumer during debate last week. “He
is not a mainstream conservative. He is the Frankenstein nominee —
a stitching together of the worst parts of the most troubling nominees
we have seen.”
Republicans claims that Democrats are simply being obstructionist and
are punishing the nominees in some cases for their strongly held religious
beliefs. Democrats seem to be targeting “traditional pro-life Catholic
conservatives,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah
last week. “Certainly, Pryor is one; Kuhl is another,” he
added.
But such strongly held religious beliefs, if promoted from the bench,
particularly at the appeals court level, could have a major impact on
the civil rights in the US according to Nancy Zirkin, LCCR deputy director.
“If the Bush administration is successful in making lifetime appointments
of the right-wing judges it has nominated, the civil rights of millions
of Americans will be dramatically reduced.”
Source: OneWorld.net
Iran-Contra, amplified
Analysis by Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Aug. 11— As Karl Marx might have said, “A
specter is haunting Washington — the specter of Iran-Contra.”
Even some of the people and countries are the same. And the methods
— particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals
of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy
— are definitely the same.
Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small
group of officials based in the National Security Agency (NSC) and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an “off-the-books”
operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages.
Taken collectively, what these officials describe and what is already
on the public record suggest the existence of a disciplined network
of zealous, like-minded individuals centered in Feith’s office
and around Perle in the DPB and operating with the approval of Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and
Vice President Dick Cheney.
They used the proceeds to sustain the Nicaraguan contras — US-sponsored
rebels fighting Managua’s left-wing government — in defiance
of both a congressional ban and of official US policy as enunciated
by the State Department and President Ronald Reagan. It was never clear
whether Reagan understood, let alone approved, the operation.
The picture emerging from the latest reports about the manipulation
of intelligence in the drive to war with Iraq, as well as efforts by
administration hawks to deliberately aggravate tensions with Syria,
Iran, and North Korea in defiance of official State Department and US
policy, suggest a similar but much more ambitious scheme at work.
As with Reagan, in this case, too, it is difficult to determine whether
Bush — or even his NSC director, Condoleezza Rice — fully
understands, let alone approves, of what the hawks are doing.
There was some hint of a parallel policy apparatus dating back just
after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was known early on,
for example, that the Pentagon leadership, without notice to the State
Department, the NSC, or the CIA, convened its advisory Defense Policy
Board (DPB), headed by Richard Perle, to discuss attacking Iraq within
days of the attacks.
The three agencies were also kept in the dark about a mission undertaken
immediately afterward by former CIA director and DPB member James Woolsey
to London to gather intelligence about possible links between Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, as if
the CIA or the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
could not be trusted.
While Woolsey’s trip recalls the more benign shenanigans of the
Iran-Contra crowd, consider some of the more recent press reports.
Item: Iran-Contra alumnus Michael Ledeen (and close Perle associate)
has renewed ties with his old acquaintance, Manichur Ghorbanifar, an
Iranian arms merchant who became the key link between the NSC’s
Oliver North, the operational head of Iran Contra, and the so-called
“moderates” in the Islamic Republic.
To what end? It appears that certain elements in the Pentagon leadership,
specifically Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, are
trying to sabotage sensitive talks between Teheran and the State Department
on co-operation over al-Qaeda and other pressing issues affecting Afghanistan
and Iraq.
They think Ledeen’s old friend Ghorbanifar can help, according
to Newsday, which reported Friday that two of Feith’s senior aides
— without notice to the other agencies — have held several
meetings with the Iranian, whom the CIA has long considered “an
intelligence fabricator and nuisance.”
Item: US aircraft and Special Operations Forces (SOF) intercepted and
destroyed a residential compound and two small convoys that were heading
from Iraq into Syria in mid-June, killing as many as 80 civilians. They
then subdued and arrested five Syrian guards across the border, taking
them back to Iraq, where they were held and interrogated over the strong
objections of the State Department for five days.
For what purpose? The Pentagon says it thought senior Hussein officials
were trying to make a run for it on a smuggling route. But an expose
last month by The New Yorker suggested that the raid and arrests may
have been part of a deliberate effort to inflame tensions with Damascus
and thus put an end to remarkably close co-operation between Syria,
the CIA and the State Department in the campaign against al-Qaida.
Item: Certain “high-level circles within the administration”
were reported by the right-wing ‘Washington Times’ Friday
to be hoping to persuade Chinese military officers to co-sponsor a coup
d’etat with their North Korean counterparts against leader Kim
Jong Il.
While it is not clear the proposals have been acted on concretely, the
Times noted that the Pentagon leadership disagrees strongly with the
State Department’s efforts to engage Kim in talks to persuade him
to abandon his nuclear-weapons program in exchange for a non-aggression
pledge.
Just before Korea agreed to resume talks last week, Undersecretary of
State John Bolton, widely considered to be much closer to the Pentagon
hawks than his superiors at State, delivered a blistering attack on
Kim in what was seen by analysts here as a deliberate provocation.
Item: Anonymous “senior administration officials” informed
a prominent conservative columnist of a covert CIA operative (whose
name he then published) jeopardizing her career and possibly exposing
numerous ongoing covert actions and agents who worked with her.
To what end? The agent is the wife of Joseph Wilson, a retired career
foreign service officer who publicly exposed President George W. Bush’s
now-infamous assertion that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake
in Africa as a fabrication.
While some analysts have said the disclosure of his wife’s identity,
a felony under US law, was an attempt to discredit him, he charged this
week that the move “was clearly designed to intimidate others from
coming forward” to tell what they know about the administration’s
manipulation of intelligence.
No one knows yet whether such intimidation will work, but recently retired
intelligence and foreign service officials and military officers, and
a growing number of anonymous active-duty officials, have indeed been
coming forward with consistent stories about the manipulation and exaggeration
of intelligence in order to justify the war against Iraq and, more recently,
efforts to hype evidence about the alleged unconventional threat posed
by Syria.
Taken collectively, what these officials describe and what is already
on the public record suggest the existence of a disciplined network
of zealous, like-minded individuals centered in Feith’s office
and around Perle in the DPB and operating with the approval of Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and
Vice President Dick Cheney.
This network includes high-level political appointees, such as Bolton,
who are scattered around several other key bureaucracies, notably in
the State Department, the NSC staff, and, most importantly, in Cheney’s
office.
Cheney, of course, has a direct link to Bush (and all the heads of agencies)
independent of Rice, while his powerful chief of staff and national
security adviser, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, also enjoys exceptional
access and influence.
Indeed, the two men’s frequent visits (as well as those of another
DPB member, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich) to CIA headquarters
before the Iraq war have been cited by retired and anonymous intelligence
officers as having exercised an intimidating influence on analysts who
disagreed with the more sensational assessments about Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida produced by Feith’s office.
Newsday’s disclosure that Feith’s office has been used for
secret contacts with Ghorbanifar suggests that its work goes well beyond
assessing intelligence and making policy recommendations.
According to one career military officer who worked for eight months
in the Near East/South Asia bureau (NESA) in that office, the political
appointees assigned there and their contacts at State, the NSC, and
Cheney’s office tended to work as a “network” and often
deliberately cut out, ignored or circumvented normal channels of communication
both within the Pentagon and with other agencies.
“I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told
not to contact their counterparts at State or the (NSC) because that
particular decision would be processed through a different channel,”
wrote retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowsky last week. “What I saw
was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline.”
In an interview with IPS, she insisted that her views of Feith’s
appointees and operations were widely shared by other professional staff,
and quoted one veteran career officer “who was in a position to
know what he was talking about” as telling her before the Iraq
war: “What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra look like
amateur hour.”
“I think it’s time for a serious investigation (of Feith’s
office),” she said. “I just hope Congress will take it on.”
Groups challenge ‘terror’ suspects’
detention
By Katrin Dauenhauer
Washington, DC, Aug. 5 (IPS)— More than a
year after the administration detained two US citizens without charges,
a growing number of groups reflecting a broad spectrum of views believe
that constitutional rights here are increasingly threatened by the so-called
‘war on terrorism.’
Soon after their arrests, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla were declared
enemy combatants by President George W. Bush and detained by the military
— without a chance to see lawyers or face charges.
FBI officials arrested Padilla at Chicago’s O’Hare International
Airport last May after he arrived from Pakistan.
He was held as a material witness in a plot to detonate a radioactive
“dirty bomb” before Bush declared him to be an “enemy
combatant” the day after his arrest.
Since then, Padilla has been held in solitary confinement in a military
brig in South Carolina.
The Cato Institute, Constitution Project, and four other groups filed
a friend-of-the-court or “amicus curiae” brief in federal
appeals court last week in which they argued that the administration
has no legal authority to detain a US citizen indefinitely without charge,
and that the act violates the constitution.
“No congressional action justifies the lawless seizure and incommunicado
detention of Mr. Padilla by the executive,” argues the brief. “To
the contrary, the executive action runs brazenly afoul of the constitutional
principles of separation of powers and the statutory law that safeguards
that principle.”
According to Levy, “the central issue involved is separation of
powers. We don’t contend that the justice department has to give
every combatant an attorney and a full hearing in federal courts.
“But we do contend that the executive branch unilaterally cannot
arrest a US citizen on US soil, detain him in a military brig without
any charges, without access to an attorney and without any ability to
argue in his own defense.”
“That’s why we joined together. We felt that a cross-section
of ideological views from left to right might convince the court that
this issue is of broad relevance to all Americans of all political persuasions,”
he added.
“American citizens have a right to a lawyer and the right to be
charged with a crime,” said John Whitehead, president and founder
of the Rutherford Institute, a non-profit civil liberties group.
“So far that hasn’t happened (in the Padilla case) because
the president — much like the old kings in Europe — just made
up the law. What we see the Bush administration doing is overriding
our constitution. I think it’s tyranny,” said Whitehead.
“The (Padilla) case is incredibly important because it’s really
unprecedented,” said Fiona Doherty from the Lawyers Committee for
Human Rights.
“It’s really the first time the government is effectively
saying that it has the authority to do whatever it likes with an American
citizen just by invoking the “enemy combatant” label. And
it refuses to tell us why it thinks Mr. Padilla is an enemy combatant.
It wants the courts to look the other way,” she said.
