#82: War Problems: 08.6.22 - 08.8.22:
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0) USA: Constitution, Wars, Nukes, Slavery.
1) Past Corpse: Taiwan's Revised "ROC".
2) Cults, Ideologies, Extremists, etc.
3) War-state Syndrome.
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0) USA:--------------------------------
0) 1. Constitutional Problems:---------
0) 1-1. 'FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Want Your Constitutional Rights Back? Sign a New Declaration for Independence Day' http://tinyurl.com/4zatr4
0) 1-2. 'You Belong to Us' http://tinyurl.com/6mv99p
0) 1-3. 'The American Police State' http://tinyurl.com/5q3yx3
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0) 2. Wars:----------------------------
0) 2-0. Weapon Technology:-------------
' US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability' ' David Hambling Aug12,08 NewScientist.com news service http://tinyurl.com/6s7q2y
0) 2-1. Guantanamo's Chinese "Brainwashing".
0) 2-2. 'Seoul Probes Civilian `Massacres’ by US' http://tinyurl.com/5pkyw7
0) 2-3. 'The REAL 1960s Terrorists Were Named Westmoreland, Johnson and Nixon' http://www.freepress.org http://tinyurl.com/6geynu
0) 2-5-1. Iran: 'A War of Self-Destruction' http://tinyurl.com/5k85mu
0) 2-5-2. 'Mainers Unite to Prevent War With Iran' http://tinyurl.com/5vye6t
0) 2-6-1. 'Who Started Cold War II?' http://tinyurl.com/6987g8
0) 2-6-2. 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Georgian Forum' http://tinyurl.com/5gql55
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0) 3. Nukes:---------------------------
0) 3-0. Anti-Nuke Principles:----------
0) 3-0-1. 'A Powerful Peace: If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own' http://tinyurl.com/5pxgwo
: Adapted from his latest, "The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger".
0) 3-0-2. 'End Nuclear Threat, Next President Told' http://tinyurl.com/63rjgv
0) 3-1. Hiroshima/Nagasaki:------------
0) 3-1-0. ' Truman: Hiroshima a 'Military Base' ' http://tinyurl.com/5ly3go
0) 3-1-1. 'Hiroshima and Nagasaki' http://tinyurl.com/dkgu3
0) 3-1-2. 'Hiroshima Marks Bomb Anniversary With Hope For US Change' http://tinyurl.com/5hkzwa
0) 3-1-3. 'The Lies of Hiroshima Live On, Props in the War Crimes of the 20th Century' http://tinyurl.com/5l59ge
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0) 4. Slavery:-------------------------
' How the West (Except for the U.S.) Ended Slavery' http://tinyurl.com/6y6tgx
: On Jim Powell's "Greatest Emancipations: How the West Ended Slavery" except USA.
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1) Past Corpse: Taiwan's Revised "ROC".
2) Cults, Ideologies, Extremists, etc.:
2) 1-1. 'Children of God' Wikipedia, Post Jun22,08 http://tinyurl.com/6ymosr
2) 1-2. 'Interview with Jeff Sharlet' http://tinyurl.com/5kc8c9
2) 1-3. "The Family"
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3) War-state Syndrome:------------------
3) 1-1. 'Waterloo Day: 'Even the horses were screaming'' http://tinyurl.com/6zdmnq
3) 1-2. "Waterloo days;: The narrative of an Englishwoman resident at Brussels in June, 1815" http://tinyurl.com/59my8l
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0) USA:---------------------------------
0) 1. Constitutional Problems:----------
0) 1-1. 'FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Want Your Constitutional Rights Back? Sign a New Declaration for Independence Day' Bill of Rights Defense Committee: Jun27,08 11:30AM: http://tinyurl.com/4zatr4
CONTACT: Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC)
Nancy Talanian, Director, Bill of Rights Defense Committee
413.582.0110, ntalanian@bordc.org
: "" June 27 - With Independence Day approaching, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) calls on Americans who are unwilling to sacrifice their fundamental liberties in the name of national security to sign a new Declaration and to pledge their support for fully restoring Constitutional rights and human rights.
More than 500 people and organizations across the US have already signed “A Declaration for Our Times,” which BORDC is running as a half-page signature ad in the New York Times during the week of July 4 and is producing as video and audio public service announcements. BORDC is accepting additional signers until Sunday, June 29, at midnight. "
" According to the author of “A Declaration for Our Times,” Christopher Pyle, “The situation that we face today is in many ways worse than the situation that sparked the War for Independence…George W. Bush’s violations of liberty far exceed anything that King George the Third ever did.”
Links:
* Read the “Declaration for Our Times” at http://constitutioncampaign.org/ad/ad.pdf
* Sign the New York Times ad (deadline June 29 at midnight EDT) at www.constitutioncampaign.org/ad
* Pledge support for the People’s Campaign for the Constitution and join or form a local coalition at www.constitutioncampaign.org "
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0) 1-2. 'You Belong to Us' Thomas E. Woods: LewRockwell.com: Aug11,08: http://tinyurl.com/6mv99p
""Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [view his website; send him mail] is senior fellow in American history at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the author, most recently, of Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush (with Kevin R.C. Gutzman), Sacred Then and Sacred Now: The Return of the Old Latin Mass and 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask. His other books include How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (get a free chapter here), The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards), and the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.""
: "" Save a link to this article and return to it at www.savethis.comSave a link to this article and return to it at www.savethis.com Email a link to this articleEmail a link to this article Printer-friendly version of this articlePrinter-friendly version of this article View a list of the most popular articles on our siteView a list of the most popular articles on our site
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In late 2007, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story for Time magazine calling for a massive national service program to be imposed on American young people. If you’d like to read it, knock yourself out. Someone probably needs to smash it, but the avalanche of propaganda and nationalism you’ll find there was too demoralizing for me to attempt it. The very idea that helping someone in your neighborhood should be called "service to the nation" should be spooky and Orwellian enough, but for many people I guess it isn’t.
One thing I couldn’t get out of my head, even though it’s not by any means the weirdest aspect of the program, is Stengel’s proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of National Service. I think it was this piece of advice that struck me the most: "And don’t appoint a gray bureaucrat to this job; make it someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Bloomberg, who would capture the imagination of the public." "
... ...
" Not that anyone cares, but just where in the Constitution (that some people laughingly pretend limits Washington’s power) is there mention of a power to drive American citizens into involuntary service to the federal government? Kevin Gutzman and I ask the question in our new book, Who Killed the Constitution? The point of our book is not so much to wring our hands over the poor Constitution and dream about how wonderful it would be to return to it (as much of an improvement as that would surely be). The point, as in this example, is to show how government really works, in contrast to the pristine model kids learn in "social studies." Alleged restrictions like the Constitution pose no restraints on government at all, which merely interprets them out of existence. This process is not only fascinating in its own right, but it also speaks volumes about the nature of government, which is why we wrote a book about it.
For example, the Thirteenth Amendment seems clear enough:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Very simple: there can be no involuntary servitude in the United States except in the case of those convicted of crimes. Right?
Let’s see what happened when the Supreme Court finally took up the issue. Although Chief Justice Roger Taney had written a memorandum on the subject in 1863, dismantling the government’s case for conscription point by point before the future Thirteenth Amendment had even been drafted, it was not until what became known as the Selective Draft Law Cases of 1917 that the Court took up the question formally. The defendants in these cases had refused to present themselves for the draft, enacted by the Conscription Act of 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson called on them to do so. They asserted that the draft law was unconstitutional on various grounds, among them that the Constitution had not given Congress a draft power. Lower courts upheld their convictions.
Chief Justice Edward White’s views on the subject were relatively unsurprising. "As the mind cannot conceive an army without the men to compose it," he wrote, "on the face of the Constitution, the objection that it does not give power to provide for such men would seem to be too frivolous for further notice." So if government has the power to raise armies, it therefore has the power to raise them by any means whatever, including by forcing people to serve. (I guess that falls under the "necessary and proper" clause.)
White pointed to "the almost universal legislation" allowing conscription around the world as evidence against the claim that the U.S. government lacked this power. He provided citations to the draft laws recently in effect in Argentina, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Belgian Empire, Brazil, the Bulgarian monarchy, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, the Chinese Empire, the Danish monarchy, Ecuador, the French Empire, the Greek monarchy, the German Empire, Guatemala, Honduras, the Italian monarchy, the Japanese Empire, Mexico, the Yugoslav monarchy, the Dutch Empire, Nicaragua, the Norwegian monarchy, Peru, the Portuguese monarchy, the Rumanian monarchy, the Russian Empire, the Siamese monarchy, the Spanish Empire, Switzerland, El Salvador, the Ottoman Empire, Canada, and South Africa. In short, the examples of Asian and European imperial republics (such as France) and monarchies of various stripes, South Africa, Switzerland, the Windsor Dominion of Canada, and a number of Latin American banana republics were marshaled by Chief Justice White to disprove the assertion that Americans were supposed to be free.
Daniel Webster, speaking half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, argued in a memorable speech for the unconstitutionality of the draft:
Is this the real character of our Constitution? No, sir, indeed it is not. The Constitution is libeled. The people of this country have not established for themselves such a fabric of despotism. They have not purchased at a vast expense of their own treasure and their own blood a Magna Carta to be slaves. Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest rights of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life itself, not when the safety of their country and its liberties may demand the sacrifice, but whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? Sir, I almost disdain to go to quotations and references to prove that such an abominable doctrine has no foundation in the Constitution of the country. It is enough to know that that instrument was intended as the basis of a free government, and that the power contended for is incompatible with any notion of personal liberty.
That’s not quite what the Supreme Court would say, just over a century later, in the Selective Draft Law Cases. There, the possibility that anyone could describe forced labor in the service of the central state’s military ambitions as involuntary servitude is indignantly dismissed without even the pretense of an argument. That is, unless you consider this an argument: it’s an honor to serve the government, and an honor cannot be involuntary servitude. It is a "supreme and noble duty" to fight what Daniel Webster called "the battles of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage," so we’ll have none of this Thirteenth Amendment nonsense!
Here are Chief Justice White’s exact words:
Finally, as we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement.
So Justice White is so appalled by the comparison of conscription to involuntary servitude that he declares, without argument, that it refutes itself. Well, that’s all I need to hear. The defendants must have marched out of the courtroom in shame when they heard that.
As usual, Ron Paul gets to the heart of things: "Young people are not raw material to be employed by the political class on behalf of whatever fashionable political, military, or social cause catches its fancy. In a free society, their lives are not the playthings of government."
No kind of conscription, whether on behalf of the welfare or the warfare sectors of the imperial capital, can be reconciled with freedom. Nor can it be reconciled with the Constitution. But those who govern us laugh with contempt at such arguments. And yet Americans persist in the delusion that they have a Constitution that limits their government. There is something deeply pathological about this. What else can be said? ""
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0) 1-3. 'The American Police State' William L. Anderson: Aug11,08: LewRockwell.com: http://tinyurl.com/5q3yx3
""William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economicst at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services.""
: "" The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008, 264 pages (paperback), $16.95.
In the past six years, I have written a number of articles, papers, and columns about how any pretense of the rule of law in the United States is dead. This was not always the position I took, but after reading the hardback version of The Tyranny of Good Intentions in 2001, I realized that not only were the people who were officially entrusted with keeping the law in this country not interested in fulfilling their duties, but that the very nature of law itself in the USA has fundamentally changed. That change, unfortunately, has been for the worse. I wish I had more comforting words.
Paul Craig Roberts, an economist and a former assistant secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, and Lawrence M. Stratton, an attorney and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Christian Ethics at Princeton Seminary, have exposed the modern U.S. legal system for the wretched lie that it has become. From the fraud of the "War on Terror" to the destruction of ancient legal doctrines, Roberts and Stratton document the death of law in the United States.
Before I go through the litany of cases and situations that Roberts and Stratton present, I first must point out that the main service they do is not the presentation of many injustices that are a regular part of U.S. law today – though what they say is important, if not downright discouraging. (I would warn all readers that they need to prepare to be angry and shocked at the many evils done today in the name of the law. If a reader has problems with high blood pressure, I would urge that person to stop right here.)
No, the most important thing that Roberts and Stratton do is to educate the reader about the source of U.S. law, how it began, and why it has become so corrupted. In this review, I will deal first with their vision of the law and the downfall of that vision, before mentioning a few cases.
While we might look back to the signing of the Magna Charta in 1215 as the beginnings of what are called the Rights of Englishmen, perhaps the most influential document in the history of our law was (I emphasize "was") William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published between 1765 and 1769. As Roberts and Stratton point out, Blackstone believed that the law should be a "shield for the innocent" and that the purpose of law (and government) was protection of innocent people (and their property) from predators – and from the predatory state.
From Blackstone’s vision came the view of "innocent until proven guilty," and the protection of rights for those who were accused. From Blackstone, we are given the famous quote: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer." Indeed, the concept Rights of Englishmen has been absolutely vital to the very idea of liberty in this country.
However, there also was a competing vision, one that was drawn up by the "father" of modern government, Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the one who penned the term, "utilitarianism." Bentham scoffed at the idea of individual rights, and believed that the state needed to be a mechanism by which the largest number of people could be able to experience the greatest pleasure with the least amount of pain.
In Bentham’s view, the state was to accomplish that purpose by being as unrestrained as possible, led by people whose vision was superior to the vision of ordinary people who did not know better. Law, in Bentham’s view, was not to be a "shield" for innocent people, but rather a set of rules that would push people in a certain direction through incentives, both benign and harsh. Even wrongful convictions of innocent people were not harmful, for they empowered the state and sent a message to everyone else.
For example, readers of this page and (one would hope) most Americans recoil at the thought of government using torture to extract confessions. While Blackstone railed against the use of the "rack" and other such torture devices, Bentham saw torture as useful for the state, to be administered by the Wise State as a mechanism to teach the subjects of a country to obey their political masters.
Another example came with the use of prisons. Bentham believed that people should be arrested and imprisoned before they committed crimes. The state would be wise enough to determine who was a threat and who was not, and those people deemed to be a threat to "society" were to be locked up and forced to engage in labor. Moreover, prisons were not to be dedicated to incarcerating dangerous and violent people; they were to be used as tool to strengthen the power of the state.
Where Blackstone believed that government should be restrained by natural law, and be a "shield" for the innocent, Bentham saw the state’s role to be a sword against people who might threaten the well-being of those in political power. In his view, there was no such thing as "natural law;" indeed, law was nothing but a set of rules put into place by those who had power.
It does not take a particularly astute person to see which vision has triumphed in the United States. Roberts and Stratton, after laying out the competing visions of law, demonstrate unequivocally just where U.S. law is headed, and the many injustices that the Benthamite vision has visited upon innocent people.
From the Drug War (and the policies of asset forfeiture – read that, seizure by government authorities of property under flimsy pretenses of guilt) to the creation of ex post facto laws to bills of attainder, they document conclusively just how prosecutors, corrupt judges, and the police have destroyed any last vestiges of natural law and constitutional rule.
For example, they deal with the ancient doctrine of mens rea, which meant that in order for a person to be charged with a crime, authorities had to show that he or she intended to commit a crime. Blackstone wrote that a "vicious will" was necessary for such charges to be made justly. Bentham thought otherwise.
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court and lawmakers have obliterated mens rea, in the process wiping out a very real protection that individuals had against the predatory state. In their chapter, "Crimes Without Intent," Roberts and Stratton outline a number of criminal cases brought in which it was clear that the defendants did not intend to break the law – or even knew they were doing so.
One very sad case involves that of Benjamin Lacy of Linden, Virginia, a 73-year-old producer of apple juice who was targeted by the Clinton administration and the Environmental Protection Agency in 1994. Lacy, who had written down a few wrong numbers on waste water forms (he received his information over the telephone) was tried and convicted in federal court for "conspiracy to mislead" the government.
Prosecutors theorized that Lacy was trying to cover up polluting a nearby stream. However, they never offered proof that the stream was ever polluted, and they were successful in convincing a judge not to permit Lacy to use evidence that no pollution had taken place as a defense. A sycophantic jury (What other kind of jury exists these days?) believed the prosecutors, and Lacy went to prison, his life ruined.
In case someone thinks Roberts and Stratton exaggerate, perhaps a line from the majority 1957 opinion in Lambert v. California, written by Justice William O. Douglas (mistakenly called a "libertarian" by many) will be enlightening: "We do not go with Blackstone in saying that ‘a vicious will’ is necessary to constitute a crime." In fact, while legal historians and others might claim that the Earl Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s expanded the rights of the accused, Roberts and Stratton demonstrate that this court accelerated a trend in which the state – and especially the bureaucracy – gained huge amounts of power against individuals.
When agents of the state are given unlimited power by legislators and judges (the Constitution be damned or turned into a mechanism by which to expand the powers of the state), then one should not be surprised when those agents lie or suborn false testimony. Throughout this book, Roberts and Stratton document – and I mean document – how the authorities themselves have become the lawless, and the examples are endless.
I must point out – if only because the critics of this review will accuse me of being overly favorable to the authors – that they mention my name in their section on the false prosecution of innocent Duke University students by the infamous Michael B. Nifong. As readers of my articles already know, Nifong indicted three Duke student-athletes for rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault despite knowing that they were innocent, but needing to bring charges in order to gain enough black votes in Durham County, North Carolina, to win an election. (The accuser was black, and the defendants were white. That was enough for the authorities and voters of Durham – and much of the Duke faculty and administration – to conclude that the charges simply had to be true, even if no evidence of a crime existed.)
While I appreciate the authors’ pointing out my very small role in exposing Nifong’s predations, I also can say that I would have written this review even had they not mentioned my name. In fact, I will say here that no book – no book – has influenced me more than their 2000 hardback version of Tyranny, and this book is an improvement over the original. If a reader wishes to understand the points from which I come as I deal with the legal abominations of the authorities of this country, this book is the best place to start.
I will go farther and say that I really did not understand the law until I read the first version of Tyranny, and that the book gave me the equivalent of a legal education. Had it not been for Roberts and Stratton, I never would have become involved in the Duke case at all, not because I would have believed Nifong, but rather because I would not have understood the real issues behind the case.
This book is not a politically-motivated polemic, as both conservatives and liberals are exposed. The modern Drug War is the creation of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and is championed by most conservatives (and especially the Christian Right). The legacy of this "war" has been the explosion of the U.S. prison population from about 300,000 when Reagan took office in 1981, to more than two million today.
Yet, liberals also come under scrutiny. Roberts and Stratton document the massacre of innocents at the home of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, which liberals championed aggressively. (I watched the 1995 U.S. Senate hearings on the affair, and Senate Democrats did everything they could to discredit the critics of Janet Reno’s Department of "Justice" which ordered the attacks.) The evisceration of mens rea accelerated during the Clinton administration and is a staple today of modern political liberalism, which seeks to criminalize normal business practices and more.
As I warned earlier, a careful reading of this book is guaranteed to raise one’s awareness – and blood pressure. I can feel mine rising as I write these words, so I will stop at this point, for the sake of my own health.
I cannot overemphasize just how important this book really is for those who care about liberty and the rule of law. This is not something which looks at modern law and makes a few recommendations, as though a few "reforms" would make a difference. No, Roberts and Stratton have attacked the modern tyrannical state root and branch and have demonstrated conclusively not only that the Bentham vision has "won" the legal battle in this country, but just how utterly destructive that "vision" really has become.
Perhaps all we can do right now is to learn, and for those who wish to better understand the foundations of liberty, this is a good place to start. A very good place. ""
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0) 2. Wars:--------------------------
0) 2-0. Weapon Technology:-----------
' US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability' ' David Hambling Aug12,08 NewScientist.com news service http://tinyurl.com/6s7q2y
: "" An airborne laser weapon dubbed the "long-range blowtorch" has the added benefit that the US could convincingly deny any involvement with the destruction it causes, say senior officials of the US Air Force (USAF).
The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is to be mounted on a Hercules military transport plane. Boeing announced the first test firing of the laser, from a plane on the ground, earlier this summer.
Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, used the phrase "plausible deniability" to describe the weapon's benefits in a briefing (powerpoint format) on laser weapons to the New Mexico Optics Industry Association in June.
Plausibly deniable
John Corley, director of USAF's Capabilities Integration Directorate, used the same phrase to describe the weapon's benefits at an Air Armament Symposium in Florida in October 2007 (see page 15, pdf format).
As the term suggests, "plausible deniability" is used to describe situations where those responsible for an event could plausibly claim to have had no involvement in it.
Corley and Kaiser did not respond to requests from New Scientist to expand on their comments. But John Pike, analyst with defence think-tank Global Security, based in Virginia, says the implications are clear.
"The target would never know what hit them," says Pike. "Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike."
Silent strike
A laser beam is silent and invisible. An ATL can deliver the heat of a blowtorch with a range of 20 kilometres, depending on conditions. That range is great enough that the aircraft carrying it might not be seen, especially at night.
With no previous examples for comparison, it may be difficult to discern whether damage to a vehicle or person was the result of a laser strike.
The 5.5-tonne ATL combines chlorine and hydrogen peroxide molecules to release energy, which is used in turn to stimulate iodine into releasing intense infra-red light.
The US uses Hercules aircraft for accurate cannon strikes on moving vehicles. The ATL is touted as bringing a new level of accuracy to such attacks, for example being able to pinpoint a vehicle's tyres to disable it safely.
A second, larger version of the laser is also nearing initial testing. The much larger Airborne Laser is intended for missile defence and will be carried by a Boeing 747. ""
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0) 2-1. Guantanamo's Chinese "Brainwashing":
'China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo' Scott Shane: Jul2,08: by The New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/6gsjp4
: "" WASHINGTON - The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods. "
" The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities. "
" The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.” "
" Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.
“It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.” "
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Hitlers in LI:
'Getting to know the Hitlers' Jan20,02 http://tinyurl.com/5w8f26
FOR more than 50 years, the relatives of Adolf Hitler have hidden under false names in Long Island, New York. They have not spoken publicly since the Second World War. In a revelatory new book to be launched this week, they break their silence. David Gardner tells their story.
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0) 2-2. 'Seoul Probes Civilian `Massacres’ by US' Charles J. Hanley / Jae-Soon Chang:
Aug4,08 by The Associated Press: CommonDreams.org: http://tinyurl.com/5pkyw7
""Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.""
: "" SEOUL, South Korea - South Korean investigators, matching once-secret documents to eyewitness accounts, are concluding that the U.S. military indiscriminately killed large groups of refugees and other civilians early in the Korean War.0804 01 1
A half-century later, the Seoul government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has more than 200 such alleged wartime cases on its docket, based on hundreds of citizens’ petitions recounting bombing and strafing runs on South Korean refugee gatherings and unsuspecting villages in 1950-51.
Concluding its first investigations, the 2 1/2-year-old commission is urging the government to seek U.S. compensation for victims. "
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0) 2-3. 'The REAL 1960s Terrorists Were Named Westmoreland, Johnson and Nixon' Harvey Wasserman: Aug4,08 by CommonDreams.org: " first appeared at http://www.freepress.org ": http://tinyurl.com/6geynu
: "" Hate-mongering against alleged “leftist 1960s terrorists” now fills the days of anti-Obama rage for the Rovian bloviator battalion.
Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Baby Boom professors, social workers , etc, are front and center for the hateful blatherings of the usual GOP flunkies all cowering at the prospect of an African-American president.
But there were, indeed, three 1960s terrorists whose murderous, planet-killing rampage continues to poison this nation. They tower above all others. Their names: William Westmoreland, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
This unholy trinity killed outright more than 55,000 Americans and several million southeast Asians—most of them innocent civilians—while bombing, strafing and spewing horrific toxic chemicals onto countless of square miles of previously pristine jungle. Their Agent Orange caused tens of thousands of deaths and deformities that still carry through the generations.
No single terror act in the history of the United States even remotely compares to the lethal psychosis that created and was then furthered by the Vietnam War. "
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" None of these horrific terrorists was ever prosecuted or imprisoned. But their ungodly assault drove America’s economy, currency, health care and educational systems, moral and military standing, and much, much more, into a deep decline from which we have yet to recover.
None of those bilious corporate bloviators ever mention these highest-ranking terrorists in their rants against all things sixties.
But when it comes to an American axis of evil perpetrating useless, gratuitous and totally unredeemed mass destruction of people and the planet, this is the 1960s trio that overshadows all others.
Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth.
This article first appeared at http://www.freepress.org. ""
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0) 2-5. 'A War of Self-Destruction' Chris Hedges: Aug4,08 by TruthDig.com: CommonDreams.org: http://tinyurl.com/5k85mu
: "" An attack on Iran, which Israeli and Bush administration officials appear set to carry out if Iranian uranium enrichment is not halted, would ignite a regional war in the Middle East and lead to economic collapse and political upheaval in the United States.”
In short and simple terms, we would be plunged into a depression that would make the Great Depression of the 1930s in which I spent my childhood look like boom times,” said William R. Polk, former professor of history at the University of Chicago and a member of the Policy Planning Council under President Kennedy. “Industries would fail, banks would collapse, government revenues would dry up, universities would have to close, health care, even as limited as it now is for roughly 75 million Americans, would virtually cease. In short, something like [what] the South suffered at the end of the Civil War would plague the country.”
The passage of vast amounts of oil and liquefied gas through the Persian Gulf would be disrupted. Iranian attacks, carried out with rocket- and bomb-equipped speedboats and submarines, would be deadly and effective. A classified Pentagon war game in 2002 simulated these swarming attacks by Iranian speedboats packed with explosives in the gulf; the Navy lost 16 major warships, according to a report in The New York Times. Iranian oil, which makes up 8 percent of the world’s energy supply, would instantly be taken off the market. And oil would jump to over $500 a barrel and perhaps, as the conflict dragged on, to over $750 a barrel. Our petroleum-based economy would come to a halt.
Israel would be hit by Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Hezbollah, with its new store of Iranian-supplied rockets that allegedly can reach any part of Israel, including Israel’s nuclear plant at Dimona, would enter the conflict. Israel would lash back. Terrorist attacks on U.S. targets would become frequent. U.S. casualties in Iraq would mount as the Iranians rained missiles down on U.S. bases and installations, including our imperial city, the Green Zone. Chaos and mayhem would grip the Middle East. The world financial markets would go haywire. "
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" But maybe those who advocate a war with Iran know all this. Maybe this is what they want. Maybe they understand that a war with Iran would finally kill off our weakened and anemic democracy. Maybe they see this as the dawn of a new era, an era when the last impediments to a global totalitarian capitalism can finally be removed and we can all be ground under the corporate jack boot, from Shanghai to New Delhi to Ohio. There are huge corporations that make obscene profits from human misery. They run our health care industry. They run our oil and gas companies. They run our bloated weapons industry. They run Wall Street and the major investment firms. They run our manufacturing firms. They also, ominously, run our government.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.“ ""
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0) 2-5-2. 'Mainers Unite to Prevent War With Iran' Aug15,08: CommonDreams.org: http://tinyurl.com/5vye6t
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0) 2-6-1. 'Who Started Cold War II?' Patrick J. Buchanan LewRockwell.com Aug19,08 http://tinyurl.com/6987g8
: "" The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.
Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow's superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war. "
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0) 2-6-2. 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Georgian Forum' Robert Higgs: Aug23,08: LewRockwell.com: http://tinyurl.com/5gql55
""Robert Higgs [send him mail] is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. He is also a columnist for LewRockwell.com. His most recent book is Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government. He is also the author of Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.""
: "" Well, maybe it's not really so funny, especially if someone you care about has been killed or wounded in the recent fray in the South Caucasus, but corporate shareholders who are heavily invested in U.S. military-contractor stocks are laughing all the way to the bank. In their world, nothing makes for success as much as a little shooting and looting in a U.S. client state next door to Russia.
Everyone who has spent more than five minutes perusing the data on U.S. military contracts understands that the big bucks are still to be made in the production of high-tech, cutting-edge, whiz-bang weapons platforms of the sort that enriched several generations of contractors during the Cold War. But – damn it! – the Cold War had the impudence to dry up and blow away back in the early 1990s, seemingly never to return. Of course, the contractors could always direct their wiles and their lobbying budgets toward reminding members of Congress that we never know when another Big Bad Enemy will pop up. For a while China was the favorite emerging threat to serve up at defense-industry banquets and military-association get-togethers. Yet, coming up with a truly convincing replacement for the USSR proved to be an extraordinarily difficult task. China appeared to be more interested in supplying Wal-Mart and bankrolling the U.S. Treasury than in attacking the United States. "
" The Russians have not been very cooperative about reviving the Cold War. Not that they've demonstrated themselves to be Mr. Nice Guys, especially in Chechnya, but in their relations with the West, they've shown more interest in soliciting foreign investment, exporting oil and gas, and purchasing mansions in Cyprus than in nuking London and Washington. It's true – and a fact that bears more repeating – that they still possess thousands of nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them accurately anywhere on earth within the next hour. But since the USSR's demise, they have not been talking menacingly enough to maintain the Russian threat as a terribly serious fear in the minds of American taxpayers.
Which brings us back to the little nation-state known as Georgia. Let's gather around the map and see where this faraway country is located. Ah, yes, there it is, wedged inconspicuously between Turkey and Russia at the eastern end of the Black Sea. How many of you have visited there? None of you! Well, that's not surprising, I suppose, because very few Americans have ever taken any interest in this inconsequential and uninviting place, which is best known as the birthplace of Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, an ambitious fellow who later changed his name to Joseph Stalin and became fairly well known.
In the South Caucasus, many of the people do not, shall we say, get along with one another very well. Indeed, given half a chance, they will cut one another's throats. Their ethnic feuding would scarcely bring them onto the U.S. radar screen, however, except that the Caspian basin has many producing oil wells, and a pipeline has been built through Georgia that allows the oil to be brought from Caspian Sea sources to western markets without passing through Russia. The people who occupy high offices in the Defense Department, the State Department, and the Office of the Vice President admire this feature of Georgia. So, to no one's great surprise, they set out some time ago to cultivate "democracy" in this remote little corner of the world, and lo and behold, they succeeded in putting their sonofabitch in office as the duly elected president. This sort of thing is all in a day's work for U.S. foreign policy makers, but this time it has turned out to yield an extraordinarily huge, unexpected dividend.
Because on the night of August 7, 2008, said sonofabitch, one Mikhail Saakashvili, took it upon himself to send armed troops into a small region known as South Ossetia (pop. 70,000), where the people had declared their independence from Georgia in the early 1990s and afterward had maintained a semi-autonomous political existence with Russian and Georgian peacekeepers in attendance to preserve the existing arrangement pending a more definite resolution of the matter. The locals, most of whom are said to prefer Russia to Georgia, fled the Georgian invaders, and the next day the Russian army moved swiftly into Georgia with considerable force, routing the Georgian troops and later roaming freely across the country to teach the upstart Georgians a lesson.
The U.S. government and its lap dogs in the so-called news media immediately set up a howl about the Russian campaign in Georgia and proceeded to make all sorts of veiled and not-so-veiled threats about U.S. countermeasures. Anyone with an ounce of strategic education could see, however, that the United States occupied a very weak position in this situation. Short of nuking the Russkies, the U.S. military had little capacity to defend the Georgians, and even attempting to do so would have ranked among the stupidest foreign-policy blunders of all time. The realities of the situation, however, did nothing to moderate the tremendous volume of huffing and puffing that the president, the secretary of state, and the talk-radio buffoons from coast to coast spewed out.
This blustering has had an effect on the climate of opinion, and hence on members of Congress, who are always looking for the main chance. Which returns us to our central theme: how to get filthy rich selling useless Cold War types of weapons to a captive market of U.S. taxpayers.
In a Wall Street Journal article dated August 16, 2008, reporter August Cole does not mince words: "Russia's attack on Georgia has become an unexpected source of support for big U.S. weapons programs, including flashy fighter jets and high-tech destroyers, that have had to battle for funding this year because they appear obsolete for today's conflicts with insurgent opponents." As Cole elaborates, "Some Wall Street stock analysts early on saw the invasion as reason to make bullish calls on the defense sector." One wonders what was wrong with the analysts who did not make bullish calls.
Still, we're all economic scientists here, so let's check the data. Consider Lockheed Martin, for example, the nation's leading defense company and the prime contractor for the F-22 fighter – as pure a Cold War weapon as you'll ever find. Lockheed Martin's shares had been fetching about $104, plus or minus $5, for the past year. On August 7, the day before the Russians began their counterattack, the stock closed at $108.29. Eight days later, on August 15, it closed at $116.67, giving shareholders a tidy capital gain of 7.7 percent, or roughly 350 percent on an annualized basis – a rate of return that even the most successful Wall Street titan can appreciate.
Lest we be suspected of cherry picking the data, let us consider the Philadelphia stock exchange's defense sector index, which includes the prices of seventeen major aerospace and defense companies, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, the leaders of this hungry wolf pack. On August 7, the index closed at $365.59. Eight days later, on August 15, it closed at $382,50, up 4.6 percent, or about 210 percent on an annualized basis.
Of course, post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy, and perhaps these stock-price jumps were entirely coincidental. But I don't think so. They seem to me to have solid economic logic and ample historical experience behind them. Stockholders have been down this road many times before; they know that flare-ups such as the violent episode in Georgia increase the likelihood that Congress will add money to the military budget for big-ticket weapons. When the Russian bear growls, U.S. defense-sector investors break out the champagne and frolic along Wall Street.
Yes, in the South Caucasus hundreds of people have been killed, and thousands have been displaced from their homes. Much property has been destroyed or looted. Isn't all this a small price to pay, however, to keep the mighty U.S. military industry firing on all cylinders? Let's face it: Georgia (pop. 4.6 million) is an insignificant backwater of little consequence to anybody but the people who live there and the pseudo-capitalists who've run pipelines through it. The country's GDP is about $20 billion, not even enough to buy a dozen B-2 bombers. But a tense confrontation between the Russians and the U.S. government is worth hundreds of billions to investors and other stakeholders in the military-industrial-congressional complex. ""
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0) 3. Nukes:---------------------------
0) 3-0. Anti-Nuke Principles:----------
0) 3-0-1. 'A Powerful Peace: If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own' http://tinyurl.com/5pxgwo
: Adapted from his latest, "The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger".
0) 3-0-2. 'End Nuclear Threat, Next President Told' http://tinyurl.com/63rjgv
0) 3-1. Hiroshima/Nagasaki:------------
0) 3-1-0. ' Truman: Hiroshima a 'Military Base' ' Aug6,08: CommonDreams.org: http://tinyurl.com/5ly3go
CONTACT: Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA)
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020;
or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
: "" WASHINGTON - August 6 - The U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. On Aug. 9, it dropped another on Nagasaki and President Harry Truman delivered a radio address in which he falsely claimed: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
Audio and text are available. "
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0) 3-0-2. 'End Nuclear Threat, Next President Told' Jeffrey Allen: Aug7,08 by One World.net: CommonDreams.org: http://tinyurl.com/63rjgv
""This article has been included in OneWorld.net’s “Campaign ‘08” edition of Perspectives magazine, which examines where the major presidential candidates stand on key issues affecting all the world’s people. Add your thoughts on the campaign today and get the background from experts on foreign policy, national security, foreign aid, global health, the environment, and much more.""
: "" DENVER - On the sixty-third anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, groups and individuals around the world are calling on the next U.S. president to take seven concrete steps to end the threat of nuclear terrorism and war.
“Nuclear weapons were created by humans, and it is our responsibility to eliminate them before they eliminate us,” states an appeal led by the California-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF).
The Dalai Lama, Walter Cronkite, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu are among the prominent international figures and thousands of Americans who have already signed the appeal, which will be delivered to the White House on January 20, 2009 when the next president is inaugurated.
NAPF stresses that the goal of a nuclear-weapons-free world is not as distant and difficult as the major U.S. presidential candidates have indicated, and that the United States, “as the world’s most militarily powerful nation,” is best positioned to convene world leaders to take the steps necessary to abolish the nuclear threat.
It is unclear, however, whether John McCain or Barack Obama would be willing to lead such an initiative as U.S. president. "
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0) 3-1-1. 'Hiroshima and Nagasaki' Ralph Raico Aug6,04 http://tinyurl.com/dkgu3
Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior scholar of the Mises Institute.
: " from Ralph Raico's "Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution" in John V. Denson, ed., Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001) "
" The most spectacular episode of Truman’s presidency will never be forgotten, but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve U.S. Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead. ^87 "
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0) 3-1-2. 'Hiroshima Marks Bomb Anniversary With Hope For US Change' Aug6,08 by Agence France Presse: CommonDreams.org: http://tinyurl.com/5hkzwa
: "" HIROSHIMA, Japan - The mayor of Hiroshima on Wednesday urged the next US president to work to abolish atomic weapons as the city marked the 63rd anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attack.0806 02 1
Some 45,000 people, including Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, gathered at a memorial to the dead within sight of the A-bomb dome, a former exhibition hall burned to a skeleton by the bomb’s incinerating heat. "
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0) 3-1-3. 'The Lies of Hiroshima Live On, Props in the War Crimes of the 20th Century' John Pilger. Aug6,08 by The Guardian/UK: CommonDreams.org: Complete text, without the current 43 Comments: http://tinyurl.com/5l59ge
"" The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims’ names, we must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East ""
: "" When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish light, something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead.” Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the first big lie. “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. “I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”. For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate “good war”, whose “ethical bath”, as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. “Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus “war on terror”, the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make “pre-emptive” nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current “threat”. But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America’s Defence Intelligence Estimate says “with high confidence” that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media “fact” that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country’s political and military establishment, threatened “an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland”. This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that “we did not know”? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence”? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
johnpilger.com
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008 ""
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0) 3-1-4. 'A Powerful Peace: If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own' Jonathan Schell: Aug6,08 by YES! Magazine: CommonDreams.org: http://tinyurl.com/5pxgwo
"" Jonathan Schell wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Jonathan is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and a senior visiting lecturer at Yale. He has written many books. This article is adapted from his latest, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. ""
: "" With each year that passes, nuclear weapons provide their possessors with less safety while provoking more danger. Possession of nuclear arms provokes proliferation. Both nourish the global nuclear infrastructure, which in turn enlarges the possibility of acquisition by terrorist groups.
The step that is needed to break this cycle can be as little doubted as the source of the problem. The double standard of nuclear haves and have-nots must be replaced by a single standard, which can only be the goal of a world free of all nuclear weapons.
What is it that prevents sensible steps toward nuclear abolition from being taken? The answer cannot be in doubt, either. It is the resolve of the world’s nuclear powers to hold on to their nuclear arsenals. " ... ...
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0) 4. Slavery:----------------------
' How the West (Except for the U.S.) Ended Slavery' Thomas J. DiLorenzo; http://tinyurl.com/6y6tgx
On Jim Powell's "Greatest Emancipations: How the West Ended Slavery" except USA.
: "" When Jim Powell wrote an article for the Web site "History News Network" (HNN) regarding his new book, Greatest Emancipations: How the West Ended Slavery, he was immediately denounced by some of the commentators on the site. " ...
" What could Powell, author of FDR’s Folly, Wilson’s War, and Bully Boy have written to solicit such a reaction? Greatest Emancipations is an historical account of how all the nations of the Western world – except for the U.S. – ended slavery peacefully by utilizing multiple strategies. " ...
" There was violence in some cases, but nothing remotely approaching the death and destruction of the War between the States. "Ultimately," Powell argues, "the more violence was involved in the emancipation process, the worse the outcomes were, making a provocative case for peaceful antislavery strategies."
This is why Powell has been denounced by some at HNN. As academic historians, most of them have "invested" their careers in the view that in order to end slavery 620,000 Americans had to die (the equivalent of about 6 million deaths standardizing for today’s population); more than double that number had to be maimed for life; dozens of Southern cities and towns had to be bombed into rubble; tens of thousands of Southern civilians were justifiably murdered by the U.S. Army; the Constitution had to be suspended in the North; tens of thousands of Northern civilian political dissenters were justly imprisoned without due process; hundreds of opposition newspapers were rightly shut down or destroyed; tens of millions of dollars in private property were justifiably looted by Sherman’s army (and others); and although the North’s financial cost of the war alone would have been enough to purchase the freedom of all the slaves, that was not an option.
The fact that the British, Spanish, French and others ended slavery peacefully – as did the Northern states in the U.S., where slavery existed for over 200 years – is perhaps the court historians’ best-kept secret. Most Americans have only heard of how slavery was ended in the Southern states and are unaware of how it was ended peacefully in the Northern states and in the rest of the Western Hemisphere during the 19th century. There were no "wars of emancipation" in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, or Illinois, which were all once slave states. Powell has let the cat out of the bag, and I predict that the history profession will be in a major state of panic if the book becomes too widely read. The more likely response will be to studiously ignore the book. But who needs the history profession? Read Powell’s book!
Greatest Emancipations is written from the perspective of an author who is steeped in the classical liberal tradition and, unlike almost all historians, appreciates the economic way of thinking. Consequently, one gets the impression that he is haunted by thoughts of alternative courses of history – of the opportunity cost, to use the language of economics. That is, he asks the question, what if America had followed the example of the rest of the world and ended slavery peacefully? What if Abe Lincoln had traveled to Europe to consult with the European governments about how they went about ending slavery peacefully, instead of immediately plunging the nation into the bloodiest war in world history only a few weeks after taking office? What if he acted like a statesman, in other words, rather than as a warmonger and a tyrant? (These are not Powell’s words, but they are the gist of what he is saying.)
To make the point that the rest of the world utilized multiple strategies in the struggle to end slavery in a single century, after the institution had prevailed for some three thousand years, Powell begins with a discussion of ideas that inspired abolitionists throughout the world. These included religious ideas, but religion was never enough. All of the major religions at one time or another accepted or endorsed slavery. What was necessary was the natural rights philosophy that man’s rights to life and liberty are God-given rights. "These ideas," most eloquently stated by Jefferson, says Powell, "were to inspire abolitionists in the United States and abroad, and they helped change history."
The story of how Great Britain ended slavery peacefully is one of the highlights of the book. There were once as many as 15,000 slaves in England herself, along with hundreds of thousands of slaves all throughout the British empire. The British abolitionists combined religion, politics, publicity/public education campaigns, and the legal system to put an end to slavery just two decades prior to the War between the States. The story as told by Powell reminded me once again of the greatness of the American abolitionist Lysander Spooner, author of a book entitled The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. Although Spooner questioned the legitimacy of the Constitution on generations succeeding the founders’, he apparently believed that it could be the proper tool with which to peacefully end slavery in America. His case was never refuted; even Southern apologists for slavery admitted as much. But Spooner’s legal/constitutional route to emancipation – similar to the route taken by all the rest of the world – was short-circuited by Lincoln’s war. Once the war began, Spooner condemned Lincoln and his political compatriots, especially William Seward and Senator Charles Sumner, in extraordinarily harsh terms. (He called General Grant "the chief murderer of the war.")
Powell’s chapter on British emancipation is a fascinating read, describing the heroic William Wilberforce, a member of the House of Commons who was as responsible as any one man for the abolition of slavery in the British empire. Once he succeeded in convincing the public that slavery was barbaric, something that is certainly self-evident to modern ears, a Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, and within seven years, some 800,000 slaves were freed.
Powell then tells the story of how the British navy attempted to stop the international slave trade. Among its major antagonists were New England slave shippers, who continued to deliver slaves from Africa to the Caribbean through the mid 1860s. (The big majority of the slave ships in America were built and sailed from New York, Providence, and Boston harbors.) Although the slave trade in America was banned as of 1808, "an estimated 50,000 slaves were [also] brought into the U.S. between 1807 and 1860," writes Powell. New York City "had been a lively slave trading center."
Powell also writes of the development of the American abolitionist movement in the North, largely ignoring the fact that there were also Southern plans to end slavery (the Virginian St. George Tucker presented the Virginia legislature with a plan for peaceful emancipation in the 1790s, for instance). There was originally great resistance to abolition in the Northern states, writes Powell, just as there was everywhere else in the world. The Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island legislatures introduced bills to ban abolitionist literature; mobs wrecked abolitionist printing presses in Massachusetts; a school in New Hampshire that was used to educate black children was dragged into a swamp with oxen; free blacks were prohibited from living in Illinois ("Land of Lincoln"), Iowa, Indiana, and Oregon; abolitionist "agitators" were whipped; and orphanages for black children were burned down in Pennsylvania. The American abolitionists persevered, however, just as their European brethren had done and were doing.
Slavery was also ended peacefully in Cuba, Brazil, and the Congo, and Powell tells how in great detail. But not in the United States. Here is where Powell echoes what I wrote in The Real Lincoln. Namely, the violent way in which slavery was ended in the U.S., with the slaves being used as political pawns in a war that was about consolidating all political power in Washington, D.C., led to incredibly harsh results and delayed the achievement of any semblance of equality for at least another century. After the U.S. government orchestrated the killing of one out of four Southern men of military age and bombed and burned much of the South into rubble, carrying off tens of millions of dollars in private property (everything from jewelry to silverware, musical instruments, furniture, and clothing according to accounts of Sherman’s march), Southerners were hell-bent on revenge.
As though that wasn’t bad enough, during "Reconstruction" the adult male ex-slaves were registered to vote Republican, and helped the Republican Party loot the South with tax increase after tax increase, with little or nothing to show for all the taxes. "Republicans promoted government spending schemes that resulted in skyrocketing taxes," writes Powell. "Tax rates [in the region] in 1870 were three or four times what they had been in 1860."
Powell describes the hideous "black codes" that were put into place after the war, but he fails to mention that many of them were the work of the military dictatorships that were established by the Republican Party, which was the government in the postwar years, even if they found southerners to serve as puppet mayors, governors, etc. Such codes were originally implemented in Northern states like Illinois (where Lincoln supported them wholeheartedly), and were merely transplanted to the South after the war.
Then when the Republican Party finally left the South, after waging total war on it for four years, and "reconstructing" (i.e., politically looting) it for another twelve, the hapless ex-slaves fell victim to a vengeful white majority for the next several generations.
Perhaps the most controversial statement in Great Emancipations is the last paragraph in the chapter entitled "How Did it All Work Out?" "Although the war brought the end of chattel slavery . . . the resulting death and destruction intensified the determination of former slaveholders and their allies to suppress blacks," says Powell. "The military strategy for abolishing slavery was no short cut," as institutionalized discrimination would last for at least another century. "The idea that the federal government would protect blacks was an illusion, because they were a minority, and a minority isn’t likely to control government in a democracy." Indeed, when Lincoln himself was asked by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens near the end for the war what would happen to the former slaves, he sarcastically replied that they would have to "root, hog or die." They would have to dig their sustenance out of the earth, raise hogs, or perish, in other words.
The economist in Powell comes out in his final chapter where he discusses the possibility that compensated emancipation could have occurred in the U.S., as it had nearly everywhere else in the world where slavery existed in the nineteenth century.
"Some people have objected that the United States couldn’t have bought the freedom of all the slaves, because this would have cost too much. But buying the freedom of slaves was not more expensive than war. Nothing is more costly than war! The costs include people killed or disabled, destroyed property, high taxes, inflation, military expenditures, shortages, war-related famines and epidemics . . . . The billions of dollars of Union military expenditures during the Civil War would have been better spent reducing the number of slaveholders and slaves, accelerating progress toward total emancipation."
Perhaps the one single passage that is Powell’s most incendiary is this one on page 241: "[S]lavery was being eroded throughout the West by political trends and relentless agitation. The process would have continued and perhaps accelerated without the Civil War."
To back up this statement, Powell argues that peaceful secession would have neutered the federal Fugitive Slave Act (which Lincoln strongly supported), creating a flood of runaway slaves that could not have been stopped and would have broken the back of the slave system. Echoing Spooner’s arguments, he also says that the Confederacy would have been politically isolated by the rest of the world so that "there would have come a time, much sooner than most people might expect, when the combined effects of multiple antislavery strategies would have brought about the fairly peaceful collapse of Confederate slavery. If this seems doubtful, just recall how a combination of pressures led the mighty Soviet Union to collapse and vanish from the map – without a (nuclear) war."
Powell concludes that blacks in America would have achieved freedom and justice much sooner had emancipation been peaceful, as it had been in most of the rest of the world in the nineteenth century.
August 6, 2008
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book, Hamilton’s Curse, will be published on October 21.
Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com ""
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1) Past Corps: Taiwan's Revised Corps, "ROC":----------
' 慈湖三軍儀隊 "馬"上恢復交接 ' 華視 Jun21,08 http://tinyurl.com/4fotu6
睽違半年，三軍儀隊重回慈湖，今天三軍儀隊操演，交接過程耍槍、拋槍的高難度技巧吸引不少民眾圍觀，還有從廣西來的大陸團，碰到儀隊演出，興奮的直說自己實在太有福氣！ 半年不見！三軍隊準時早上九點鐘，向兩蔣敬禮，慈湖儀隊再現，久違的花式操槍吸引不少民眾圍觀。整齊劃一的動作，拋槍、甩槍都不能有一絲鬆懈，陸海空三軍儀隊重回慈湖，民眾搶著拍照留念，連大陸客都來捧場。 真的是福氣啦！一團二十多人大老遠廣西來台灣，就是想看這歷史悠久的儀隊操演，有表演就有人潮，水蜜桃攤販也來搶生意，不過現在只有週末或節慶才有演，縣政府想爭取常態性演出，沒有政治意圖，只是想靠觀光，多賺點銀子。(記者黃俊杰 彭佳芸報導)
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2) Cults, Ideologies, Extremists, etc.:---------------
2) 1-1. 'Children of God' Wikipedia, Post Jun22,08 http://tinyurl.com/6ymosr
: "" The Children of God (COG), later known as the Family of Love, the Family, and now the Family International (TFI), is a new religious movement, widely referred to as a cult, that started in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, United States. It was an off shoot of the Jesus movement of the late 1960s, with many of its early converts drawn from the hippie movement. It was among the movements prompting the cult controversy of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe and triggered the first organized anticult group (FREECOG). "
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2) 1-2. 'Interview with Jeff Sharlet' July7,08: The Wild Hunt, A modern Pagan perspective: http://tinyurl.com/5kc8c9
: "" If you have been around the religious blogosphere for awhile, you have most likely heard of Jeff Sharlet. An author and journalist, he helped found two seminal web sites full of insightful commentary on faith in today's world (Killing the Buddha and The Revealer), co-wrote a book about religious subcultures in America (which included a trip to a Pagan festival), and filed dispatches on the intersections of religion and power for such publications as Rolling Stone, Harpers, and Mother Jones. His most recent book is "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power", an expose of elite fundamentalism's avant-garde.
I was lucky enough to conduct a short e-mail interview with Jeff about his new book, what Pagans have to fear from The Family, and what we can do about it. ""
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2) 1-3. "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" Jeff Sharlet: May20,08:
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3) War-state Syndrome:----------------
3) 1-1. ' Waterloo Day: 'Even the horses were screaming' ' Telegraph.co.uk: Jun18,08 : http://tinyurl.com/6zdmnq
: " On Waterloo Day, Andrew Roberts reports on an extraordinary account of the battle by a 22-year-old bride that inspired Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair' "
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3) 1-2. "Waterloo days;: The narrative of an Englishwoman resident at Brussels in June, 1815" Charlotte A Eaton: http://tinyurl.com/59my8l
Amazon.com: "" These civillian accounts of life around Brussels and waterloo immediately before, during and after the battle of Waterloo are fascinating and this one by Charlotte Eaton is particularly good.
Eaton was a lady traveller and took time to describe the leisurely trip to Brussels. Her boat from Britain to France, the landing, the carriage which they brought with them, the long (dull and flat) trip along the coast to Belgium. Her descriptions of where they stayed, and what was going on are vivid and are a great asset to anyone either interested in the period, or researching books for their own novel. She used a barge type travel up river from the coast to Brussels and there almost immediately struck a town in a fever - Napoleon was marching on the massed Anglo-Dutch forces in Brussels.
Eaton's description of the civillian population over the next few days is gripping for its intimacy and occassional humour. Along with Madalene de Lancey, there is a pathos to it. The escape to Antwerp, the confusion and frenzy of the aftermath as Wellington gave chase leaving the wounded and dying behind - and little elation really only relief.
Eaton went on to write a number of other travel books but this is the best of them which I have read. It is worth getting a copy if you are interested in Waterloo - the civillian account is often forgotten and while they were not participants directly, their description from the outside adds an extra dimension and human element to the conflict. """
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