CThru.com Presents Tony Ward

Posted By John Grant

……….Reform comes slowly and not without a struggle. Here’s a joyous example from El Salvador. On a June trip I visited Oscar Romero University in Chalatenango province, a former rebel zone of much fighting. Now, there are kids with cell phones and laptops walking around campus. My friends Francisco and Barbara Acosta, in the photo below, founded the university 18 years ago, but for a number of years they have been in a fight with a small group of usurpers who, under the right-wing ARENA government, took over to fraudulently soak the university for their own interests. The 2009 election of President Mauricio Funes, from the FMLN Party, has meant a shift in political control to the left in El Salvador, though the current political climate is tricky. In November, the Salvadoran Ministry of Education officially recognized a new administration for the university. The old administration, however, did not agree to leave gracefully.

……….Francisco Acosta is a former seminarian and a highly-respected Salvadoran activist/diplomat. He was born and raised in the shadow of the Guazapa Volcano, which became a strong rebel zone during the war years. Many of his family members were killed before and during the war. He and his wife Barbara have been devoted to getting control of the university back into the hands of the Salvadoran people Oscar Romero fought so hard for and died for. It has not been an easy fight. After the Ministry Of Education’s November ruling, the struggle culminated in a four day standoff with the rector from the past administration who refused to leave his office and brought in armed gang members in an effort to hold onto his power. During the standoff, students demonstrated at the school’s gate. Finally the outgoing rector saw the light and left on January 28, allowing the school to be turned over to the good guys. It was a time for rejoicing and partying. 

Posted by John Grant

Those of us who participated in the September 12th march on the Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills Mall recall the arrest of Cheryl Biren, along with six others. I remember Biren there taking photos, it turns out, for OpEdNews.Com, a news and opinion blog site. Biren was doing her job covering the event when she was arrested by Philadelphia police.
The AEC is a tax-funded, $13 million experimental store selling the US Army as a brand to kids as young as thirteen. It employs violent computer games (“war porn”) and shooting simulators with human targets to entice mall-crawling kids into joining the military — at a time the economy is staggering from a lack of jobs. The Center is controversial and raises serious questions about how we educate our youth in today’s world and how well we equip them to analyze information in a critical fashion. 

Many of us “free-lance” or “independent” or, let’s go all the way, “radical” journalists regularly encounter the kind of difficulty Biren ran into covering the AEC march, since police departments are more and more taking it upon themselves to decide who is a legitimate journalist and who isn’t. 
When cops decide who and what constitutes a real journalist they end up permitting only those working for the mainstream, corporate media, people with corporate ID cards, pre-arranged police permits, backup staff at the office, expensive equipment, van drivers and someone to get them coffee. Anyone on a tight budget and sympathetic to the ideas expressed by demonstrators at marches like the one at the AEC are seen as loose cannons and, naturally, suspect in the eyes of the police. And since no one in the mainstream, corporate media has much interest in covering such demonstrations — well, you can see the problem.

In my case, I was there and I took some photos. I, then, chose not to challenge the cops and I left as they began pushing people out the doors. My timidity, of course, is precisely what the police approach is meant to encourage. Any reporter who stayed behind to assert their first amendment right to witness and report the arrests was subject to arrest. This is what Biren did.
We see this sort of thing a lot these days; it’s a variant on the Facts On The Ground strategy. Act first — deal with the repercussions later. The police make an arrest to eliminate a journalist, no matter how illegal the action might be, then they drop the charges and employ public relations later. During the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, the city paid out millions in lawsuit settlements for illegal arrests. On January 13, the Philadelphia DA followed this pattern and dropped all charges against Biren – four months after her arrest and an uncertain amount of grief and legal expenses later.

The 1st Amendment outlaws “abridging” the “freedom of the press.” It does not say “freedom of the well-paid, corporate press with police permits.” When the 1st Amendment was written there were no press badges; all the bureaucratic hurdles and mazes came later. 
A.J. Leibling added this famous nugget to the mix: “If you really want freedom of the press you have to own one.” Leibling could not have foreseen the age we live in, but, now, with the advent of the internet and the capacity for virtually anyone to fashion a news blog and get out there and cover news, Leibling’s observation may be more than just a witty remark.
Maybe it’s time for those of us on the left to take a hint from James Bopp Jr., the right-wing conservative lawyer from Terre Haute, Indiana, behind the recent Supreme Court case that opened the flood gates to corporate money in campaign ads. He calculated the whole thing and designed the case to obtain the decision recently dropped on American democracy like a bomb. He is now about to launch a similar case aimed to eliminate any and all restrictions on corporate funding of political campaigns.

Maybe it’s time we tip our hats to the Bopps of this culture and do some original legal thinking of our own — pull off our own “Bopp coup” in the courts — to establish that the police cannot use prejudice or whim as a basis to decide who shall report on and document their actions and who shall not. As long as a reporter is cooperative, not violent or not actively participating in whatever the cops are focusing on, it should be made clear in law that sympathy for a cause or action being covered by a reporter is not a valid reason to lump that reporter in with those being arrested. 
It’s an important Constitutional question. Can a government police force quash, silence or prevent a reporter from doing his or her job by making a phony arrest? It happens so much these days it has become part of the fabric of our times, and it contributes to the distancing of citizens more and more from the decisions and actions of their government.

As the recent corporate funding case suggests, the current Supreme Court tends to come down on the side of money and power. But the Constitution clearly does not require a reporter be equipped with money or power, or more to the point, to be connected to a corporation. Current police practice in cases like Biren’s amounts to the harassment and silencing of reporters for failing to have the proper political “juice” behind them.
If the democratic vistas of the internet we hear so much about are real, then all a reporter needs to legitimately assert 1st Amendment rights is a pen & pad, a camera and a blogsite. 
To borrow the famous film line from The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

Photos Copyright John Grant 

Posted by Ed Simmons

The costs of War, always exceeds whatever may be gained by way of the Spoils of War. It is pointless, unless the true motivation is to thin the herd. A lot of wealth to be made in the manufacturing of weapons. War can become an addiction. These weapons dealers step right up, just like any dealer, of any commodity steps up, when he senses a hunger for his product. The world would do much better if it were at peace, we all know the devastation that would come from a nuclear bomb, this thought is so frighting. It keeps us from thinking about the devastation brought upon the Earth by conventional weapons daily. Every bomb, every jet or helicopter that crashes, every artillery shell, leaves a scar. We know that our Earth, at this time in history, is having a little trouble keeping up and cleaning up all our messes. Wouldn’t you think, we could give her a break?

Man is the only species on the planet, that entertains itself, by destroying all that is around him. I read once, the meaning of life, was to make shade where it will benefit others. Maybe we should start making some shade. There have been a lot of wars in my lifetime. The only one we ever had a chance of winning, was the War on Poverty. We had that enemy on the run in this country, even around the world. I can remember when it changed, the idea of letting the rich get richer, that the fix would trickle down, and raise the poor out of their despair. To have meaningful agreements, first, we have to find all that is common, with blinders on. We have to navigate through all that is uncommon. It is not local or national , truly it is global. Minus a couple of nuts, I don’t think there is a man or woman on this planet who wants to see it destroyed.

Why not set a date in the future, say 10 or 20 years out, where a world treaty could be signed, declaring a moratorium on inflicting any damage to the earth. I don’t think we wait for 10 years to end the wars, its all a waste, there’s never nothing left. We could use all that money, working for solutions for a future.

I remember Kennedy putting the challenge of Space Exploration before the people. The Moon seemed, at the time, just out of reach. I know a guy that talks of his time, under a console at Johnson, with a slide rule in hand, figuring it out, as they went along. We got so much more from these efforts, than just the landing on the Moon. Our lives today, for better or worse, are what they are today, because of all this. The problems we would encounter, setting up a colony on the Moon, are all the problems we face today on this planet. The science we would gain without question would justify the costs. This science is priceless. If I were to talk about grabbing the Brass Ring, many young people wouldn’t have a clue, to what I was talking about. On the Merry Go Rounds, as I was growing up, an arm, stacked with Brass Rings would drop. As you went around, you would reach out, trying to grab the ring. You didn’t turn your rings in at the end of the ride for a prize, grabbing the ring was the prize. You didn’t keep it, you gave back.

It may sound to simple, but we as people, are at our best, grabbing for the brass ring. World war II, the War to End All War, the Moon Landing, the Special Olympics, the War on Poverty, all things I see as grabbing the brass ring. Our Planet spins, like the Merry Go Round spins, the arm is down, the rings are there. When are people going to forget about all the arcade games, the cupie dolls, whack a mole, ping pong balls in a fish bowl, and reach for the brass rings again.

Posted By John Grant

…….I was there in 1987 visiting a doctor friend who worked in a clinic in the middle of the island and made two-hour treks to tiny villages up in the mountains three days a week. One thing I will never forget is watching a man who worked in the clinic use a pair of common pliers to extract a tooth from the jaw of a 30-year-old peasant woman. He was having a hard time wriggling the thing out, and she was suffering immensely. But she did not let out even a peep! It gives me the chills just recalling the scene.

The 23-year-old memory of that woman’s stoicism actually inspired me six months ago to extract a painful, loose tooth of my own. In my case, it was considerably easier, and I saved a $100 dental bill. As comfortable Americans, we should purge ourselves of any sense of superiority vis-a-vis Haiti and learn to respect and honor Haitians for the suffering they have endured — and are enduring at this moment.  In that spirit, we should extend our hand.

If nothing else, the earthquake disaster should wake Americans up to what an amazing place Haiti really is — absolutely unique in the Western Hemisphere, an island liberated by Africans brought to this hemisphere in chains as slaves. While poverty and horror are the usual images that pop into Americans’ minds when they hear the word “Haiti,” the real story is much more complicated and full to the brim with stoicism, art and music. And, folks, if we get all superior and see voodoo as third-rate theatrics and nonsense, it’s no different than all religions — it’s people trying to make sense out of darkness and death. The fact is, we could learn a lot from Haiti.  

Posted by Melissa Norbeck

Decisions, decisions. Vanilla or chocolate? Tea or coffee? Pancakes or French toast? We are all faced with decisions in our lives, and we are forced to come up with answers to questions daily. But to wear, or not to wear, animal products is the question at hand. Deciding not to wear animal products really needs to be a conscious effort. In the picture from my last post, I wore “leather” boots, and someone asked the question that I knew would come up. Are my boots real leather? I knew the question would arise because when I was choosing my outfit, my mom also mentioned the boots. However, my boots are definitely all man-made material.
Ironically enough, I just went to see The Nutcracker Saturday at the Academy of Music, and PETA was outside handing out pamphlets about wearing fur. Years ago when people went to the Academy of Music, they got all decked out in their mink coats and diamonds. It’s not really like that anymore; still it was reassuring to see their presence. My aunt and I just had a conversation a few months back about wearing fur, and she thinks that people should not even wear fake fur. I disagree because there are now different options to choose from where people can still look just as good wearing faux fur and faux leather that they don’t have to wear the real thing.
The poor animals (cats, dogs, rabbits, fox, raccoons, etc…) whose fur is robbed from them, are skinned alive; how horrible that must be; just unimaginable. A problem is that many of the fur products are mislabeled, and people really don’t know what they’re buying. However, real is real, and it is expensive, so a person knows when he/she is buying real fur because of the cost. But many times the real fur is labeled with something like jackal when it is really cat or dog. So it is better to not buy real fur at all. I also have my list of companies who do not test on animals and try to only buy shampoo and makeup and things like that from those companies. I feel it is our duty to help animals; they have no voice and no choice – we are their voice, and we have the power of choice!

……John and I go back a long ways. He was the first journalist to write about my erotic photographs when he reviewed a solo exhibition at Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, 1994. Pentimenti was the first gallery to take notice of the sea change to occur in the direction of my photographic career in the early nineties. We didn’t actually meet until years later, when we were introduced socially by a mutual friend, the great documentary photographer Harvey Finkle.

John and I became regulars at Harvey’s Monday Night football parties, where the food, wine and conversation flows on a variety of topics the least of which is football. We got to know each other a little more over the years as a consequence. Recently he has become a regular contributor to this blog. I asked his close friend Harvey to write a little something about the pictures that accompany the post, in an effort to introduce you to a man filled with many passions, including our over zealous agressions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am so honored to have John part of the Tony Ward Studio team. All photos courtesy of www.harveyfinkle.com.

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John Grant

Renaissance man. A superb photographer, videographer, novelist, journalist and craftsman. John is also a leader, having been at the helm of the local Vets for Peace for about a decade. His facility with words is such that he constantly appears on the pages of our local newspapers in letters or guest op-eds. I first met John through our political activities. Both of us having traveled to Central America during the 1980’s, every once in a while I would grab a photo of John in a variety of actions. And, you can bet that any issue or subject that John touches, his knowledge is totally comprehensive. As well as a tremendous source of knowledge, he is my good friend. Harvey Finkle

Posted by John Grant

The column, below, by Stu Bykofski, ran in the Philadelphia Daily News recently. Aware of my views on the war, he had called and asked would I watch the Presidents speech with him at his home and, then, he would write about our exchange of views. I fully enjoyed the time with Bykofsky and consider him a valued new acquaintance. He even stopped by our little anti-war demonstration at City Hall the other day to say a quick hello. Bykofsky first went to work for the Daily News in 1972, and he is now one of its most respected columnists. So he fully understands the rough-and-tumble of ideas. Here is his column and a letter-to-the-editor response to the column I expect will run in the Daily News soon.  

Af-Pak speech: Both sides now
By Stu Bykofski
Daily News Columnist, December 3, 2009

PLYMOUTH MEETING’s John Grant supported and voted for Barack Obama, but it was “no sale” Tuesday night after the president outlined his plans for expanding the war and our chances for success in Afghanistan – which Grant sees as entering a fruitless, budget-busting quagmire.

Some of you may know Grant from his frequent Op-ed pieces that take issue with various American policies. A member of Veterans for Peace, the 62-year-old Vietnam vet is a self-described dope-smoking socialist, although he admits that he enjoys being a provocateur.

I invited Grant to watch the president’s speech with me because I knew how he felt – he was against entering Afghanistan in the first place – but I didn’t know precisely how I felt.

At the end, Grant disagreed with sending more troops, while I favored it, but it was not because of Obama’s persuasiveness.

His arguments had the flavor of leftovers, a meal we had eaten before. His speech came more from the head than the heart and lacked passion.

With that said, we now have an American president from the left after an American president from the right reaching the same conclusion: America’s safety and security are threatened by the swamp that is Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Are they both wrong? Are they both stupid? Are they both evil? Is it possible that both presidents saw things in the daily threat assessment that they cannot share?

Obama may be wrong, but when he says that our safety and security are entwined with Af-Pak, do I dismiss that?

Grant would say yes, because “the military-industrial complex has this guy by the balls.” Grant even grumped over Obama’s selection of West Point as the launchpad for his policy.

Several times during our conversation Grant described himself as a “radical” and, after the speech, when I asked him what the U.S. should do now, he returned to mistakes made after 9/11 because radicals are interested in root causes, he said.

When I pressed him to support a “radical” solution – pull all our troops out now, immediately, at once – he demurred, saying that he was a realist and that it would result in chaos. He would garrison our current troops behind the safety of walls.

For how long? When would we withdraw? How quickly? Grant said he didn’t have those answers and felt that I was trying to corner him.

In his speech, Obama said that maintaining the status quo – Grant’s plan – would lead to deterioration of the effort.

Grant said that if we escalate the war, al Qaeda and the Taliban might do the same. Fair point, they might. They also might retreat into the mountains, go quiet for 18 months and re-emerge as U.S. troops begin to leave, now that we’ve provided their military planners with our timetable.

We have no good options in Af-Pak.

Anyone who is certain that a strategy will succeed is a polemicist or a propagandist. There is no sure path. Oddly, what happens if we stay in is more certain than what happens if we quickly depart. If we stay in, more American deaths. If we exit, will the Taliban be satisfied to “own” Afghanistan again or will it offer a platform from which al Qaeda and radical Islam can attack Pakistan and other countries?

As an example of how complicated the situation is, one of Obama’s goals is to support the fragile democracy that is Pakistan.

That government is allied with us, but the majority of conspiracy-prone Pakistanis, according to polls, think that the U.S. is the greatest threat to world peace, and that bombs going off in Pakistani cities are planted by the CIA, Blackwater or Israel’s Mossad. With friends like these . . .

Obama didn’t mention “victory,” or the brutality and viciousness of the Taliban toward women. He avoided emotional appeals, yet it’s the same old “fear, fear, fear, the bogeyman, just like George Bush,” said Grant.

“I do not trust my government,” said Grant, even with Obama and the Democrats in control.

I won’t go that far, but I will trust Obama, now that he is an unwilling “war president,” to make the least bad of the miserable choices in front of him.

He could be wrong and so could I.

A response: Obama defends the government’s prestige

Dear Editor:

It was nice of Stu Bykofsky to invite me to his home to watch the speech by President Obama. I’m glad I was helpful to Stu for him to figure out how he “felt” about escalating the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan. He was a gracious host, and we had a fine time exchanging views. Unfortunately, he then used me a bit like a punching bag in his Thursday, December 3 column.

I’ve been in and out of the journalism business in Philadelphia for 34 years, and I went to Stu’s home fully aware of the risks. So I’m not complaining; in fact, I think Stu is a great guy.

Living in such a dangerous world, it’s easy to lose focus on exactly what the Obama West Point speech was about. As Stu pointed out, I’m a bit of a “provocateur,” so let me be provocative and suggest that Obama’s speech was not about Afghanistan at all or about really solving the threats to America’s security concerns. Obama’s speech was, instead, about reinforcing his political power as a Democratic President by not jeopardizing the prestige of the US government in time of war and, especially, the prestige of a post-Vietnam generation of generals led by General David Petraeus. Petraeus and others supporting his new counter-insurgency doctrine actually argue these days that we could have won the Vietnam War — if only we had been smarter. Obama’s speech established that he was fully invested in this new doctrine and, thus, as a “liberal” was not opposing the vast and entrenched power of the military-industrial complex, the institution General Eisenhower so eloquently warned the nation about in 1961 as he left the Presidency.

This idea about “prestige” is not mine. It is from Stanley Karnow’s highly respected book, Vietnam: A History. He writes about John Kennedy’s reluctance to escalate in Vietnam and how Kennedy said escalation was “like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.” Karnow writes how, despite his reluctance, Kennedy could not in the end hold out against the strong militarist tide pushing for escalation and, even, his own rhetoric about stopping communism in Southeast Asia. Karnow writes that Kennedy “could not backtrack without jeopardizing the American government’s prestige — and in time that consideration would become the main motive for the US commitment in Vietnam.” 

I submit that 48-years-later President Obama finds himself in the very same bind Kennedy did — maybe even worse — unable to do what people like me would have liked him to do, which is to summon the courage to fashion a policy and speech that faced up to this tragic cycle. Instead, like Kennedy and Johnson, Obama chose to reinforce the American government’s prestige and that of its military leadership by throwing more young men and women into a war policy that was doomed from the moment the Bush/Cheney administration set it in motion from their White House inner sanctums. The Profile In Courage I would have liked to see from President Obama was one in which he recognized that the nation needed to take a hit on its prestige, that defending this kind of prestige is in fact against the best interests of the American people, especially now when our economy is on the ropes and we have so many un-addressed domestic problems. Such a policy and speech would have entailed a calculated and gradual extraction of our military forces from Afghanistan. 

Obama’s Special Ambassador to Southwest Asia Richard Holbrook recently spoke by phone with Stanley Karnow. He handed the phone to General Stanley McChrystal, who asked the Vietnam historian what wisdom he had concerning the war in Afghanistan. Karnow reportedly said: “We should not be there in the first place.”   

Maybe Stu is right when he says, on one hand, I’m a “radical” while on the other I’m a “realist.”  But what I clearly am not about — what Stu oddly labeled as “Grant’s plan” — is “maintaining the status quo” in Afghanistan. The fact is I’ve written against, and taken to the streets against, the status quo of that war and the one in Iraq before they were even launched. 

All this is in the spirit of dialogue. Again, I enjoyed my exchange of views with Stu Bykofsky and would be glad to engage in more of it in the future on the topic of Afghanistan and the War On Terror. Truth does not come in a single voice; it is reached in an open and honest dialogic process. 

Sincerely,
John Grant

Posted By John Grant

It was sad watching Barack Obama cave in to the militarists on the war in Afghanistan. One, he didn’t have to give his speech on the war at West Point, which was 100% Bush; he could have given it at some location symbolic of the dire need to invest in America’s many domestic problems. Where exactly did Obama go wrong? From a progressive vantage point, he seems to have made a classic pact with the devil in order to reinforce his political capital. A writer I knew wrote a book called The Liberal Dilemma in which he outlined the problem everyone on the left faces in this country. How adamantly does one stick to one’s progressive ideals (and remaining marginalized without power) versus how much does one compromise those ideals in order to obtain power (in order to actually accomplish much-needed reforms.) Last night, Obama went too far on the compromise end of this continuum and may have fallen off the continuum entirely. 

Garry Wills, below, expresses the betrayal well. The item, at bottom, about Dan Senor’s support of the speech shows just how far he went. I met Dan Senor in the Green Zone in Baghdad in December 2003, where he was a high-powered Bush flak supporting the Iraq War who sat in with several other Green Zone warriors on a meeting our veteran and military family group had with Paul Bremer’s assistant. Senor was interested in us, he said, because a visit by the parents of soldiers in a hot war zone was “unprecedented,” something reminiscent of Russian mothers taking buses to visit their sons in places like Chechnya. Senor is now co-author of a book in stores reveling in Israel as a modern free-enterprise miracle, an “exceptionalist” argument that totally dismisses Palestinian rights. That someone like Dan Senor is supportive of Obama’s decision to escalate in Afghanistan only underlines that the decision was a bad one.

It will now take time to tell how really bad the decision is to send 30,000 more young American targets into a doomed war. John McCain said, “the worst thing we can do in Afghanistan is pursue half-measures.” To me, that means either heed the hard historic realities of counter-insurgency warfare and go all-out and send in 500,000 plus troops equipped with our most super-lethal weaponry and unburdened with moral concerns for killing civilians — or use our intelligence and diplomatic powers to remove our military forces and take a different tact. Trying to have it both ways like Obama has done is only doing exactly what we did in Vietnam — escalating the violence to avoid the really hard decisions and advance the crisis to a later date. As Stanley Karnow wrote about the war in Vietnam, our escalation decisions were about the “prestige of the American government” and not about “winning,” since McNamara and others knew early on that was impossible. That Obama chose West Point to give his speech only emphasizes how much “the prestige of the American government” — and especially the prestige of our post-Vietnam brotherhood of generals — played in his decision. He seems to have employed his well-known intellectual and analytic powers to bolster his political position in a war culture rather than using those powers and his bully pulpit to extricate the nation from the disastrous legacy of the Bush/Cheney period. He took the easy road. Tragically, it could have been different, and he could have given an altogether different speech outlining why, for our own good as a nation, we cannot afford this war any longer — and how we are going to honorably extricate our military without abandoning the Afghan people. He would have had to concede a hit on our “prestige,” but in the end it would have gone down in history as a “profile in courage” just like Kennedy’s when he stood up to Curtis LeMay in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We in the peace movement now have our work cut out for us to continue to speak truth about this doomed war and to hold the Obama’s feet to the fire on his declared July 2011 withdrawal.

Posted By John Grant

Will President Obama cave-in to the generals?

General Stanley McChrystal was appointed commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan due to his leadership in Anbar Province in Iraq, where he was given credit for the success of “the surge.” The propaganda had it that additional troops led to the success of the surge in Iraq. But as people like Bob Woodward have pointed out, that is not the way it really happened. Woodward attributed it to a “secret weapon” he would not reveal. It turns out that secret weapon was General McChrystal’s Special Operations Command, which included highly secret units that captured or assassinated people who were labeled ”irreconcilables,” the current buzzword in Petraeus counter-insurgency doctrine for people who refuse to go along with our program — ie. those who would not accept the $300 a month paid to insurgents to play ball with us. Those captured were sent to a highly secret unit in Baghdad designated by numbers that constantly changed to avoid accountability and staffed by soldiers in civilian clothes with beards, no ranks and using only fictitious first names — all designed to make tracking and accountability difficult or impossible. (This was all reported in an Esquire magazine article several years ago.) In fact, a Navy investigator was tasked to investigate charges of torture by this unit and the investigator threw up his hands and gave up because of the fictitious names and the rest. McChrystal assured his men that the Red Cross would never set foot in the unit, and it never did. Allegations of abuse and torture were reported in the Esquire article — as were tales of innocent people being run through the whole process.

None of this was even hinted at during the Senate confirmation hearing for General McChrystal. He was rubber-stamped through, we were told, because he was so desperately needed in Afghanistan, where we were basically losing the game. It was very clear that McChrystal was named commander to bring this “secret weapon” to the challenge in Afghanistan. Soldiers in these special ops units were to serve for something like five years with periods of 90 days or so in country, then some down time back in the US for rest and training; then, it was back to the front and so on. The point was to establish a long-term commitment to the war effort. The reporters have likely only broken the surface of this secret tactical program that is so critical to the larger, long-term counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan, which entails ground troops and a host of civil affairs and development tasks.  McChrystal is a very cool, smooth customer able to keep secret what he must and present a good face for the propaganda when that is needed. He likes to talk about having “humility” and about how our new task is to “protect the people.” Of course, the Taliban employ the same propaganda notion that they also are about “protecting the people” — from us. As is usually the case in such wars, the population is stuck in the middle receiving the brunt of the violence. The unavoidable challenge is that the Taliban are Pashtuns and they have lived in this very rugged terrain using Islam as a disciplinary ideology for centuries — and they don’t like outsiders. As a Vietnamese officer said to Robert McNamara years after our war there, “We knew you would eventually leave, because you could leave. We lived there and could not leave.” 

As Keith Olberman pointed out eloquently in a Special Comment Monday night, “Mister President, we cannot afford this war.”  Afghans see us as occupiers, and that won’t change. He spoke of “making our troops suffer to make our generals happy.” He mentioned the Pat Tillman case, where General McChrystal ”was willing to stand truth on its head” and pass bald-faced lies to the press and the American people. Why should we trust this man? Olberman wanted to know. “The Pentagon is in the war business!” Olberman cried — so of course they are pushing for more war. We elected an adult, civilian commander-in-chief to represent us, the hard-working, reasonable citizens of this nation, and to tell the generals “No” — as John Kennedy did vis-a-vis General Curtis LeMay and others who wanted to invade during the Cuban Crisis and as Kennedy did in being reluctant to follow McNamara’s call to escalate in Vietnam. (I’ll leave for another time any speculation about what happened to Kennedy in the end.)  

We can’t afford this war because it costs $1 million to support one soldier for a year in Afghanistan. It costs over $1 million for an MRAP truck designed to be destroyed as it protects our soldiers when they hit an IED. It costs $400 for each gallon of gasoline needed to run the MRAPs at something like 5 MPG. Now we learn the Taliban are getting stronger in the north where we thought things were calm and we had a clean route to get supplies in via Uzbekistan. We learn they are becoming more sophisticated in attacking us; that is, they are learning more about us and, as happens over time in wars like this, they will develop new strategies and tactics to attack our young soldiers. Our military is now stretched to the crisis level, with families suffering under multiple deployments, PTSD and record-high suicides. Wall Street has been bailed out, but unemployment across the nation is at unacceptable levels and we’re being told we don’t have the resources to create jobs to do things like maintain our crumbling Infrastructure.  Food stamps are now being distributed in the US at unprecedented levels and growing. Health care is an insult to common decency.  Fear of everything is on the rise. The list of domestic dysfunction goes on.  

We need to recognize the empire is showing signs of strain, and we need to find a better way fro the good of Americans here at home.  Let’s hope President Obama can figure that out before it’s too late. 

Posted by John Grant

This ran in the Philadelphia Daily News yesterday, and so far it has received the usual array of lunatic and blood-thirsty responses about “all you liberals” who want to coddle terrorists. Sorry, but America and Americans can handle the truth and it’s time reasonable citizens stood up and demanded it be given to them directly and in full. The issue is not fear of Muslims; the issue is our misguided and wasteful wars.  
JG

Getting the Fort Hood murders right
By John Grant
Op-ed, Philadelphia Daily News, November 18, 2009

REFERRING to post-9/11 anti-Muslim reaction and the Bush administration’s rush to war, Susan Sontag said: “By all means, let’s mourn together. But let’s not be stupid together.” The 13 murders by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas, seem to be provoking a similar strain of stupidity in American politics.

Once the shooting occurred, theories began whipping around like confetti in the wind. At this point, only Hasan really knows why he went postal. But some incendiary clues are flying around in this storm.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) made news by wasting no time to declare on Fox News that the murders were “the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11.” This was after he said, “It’s premature to reach conclusions about what motivated Hasan.”

Then there’s Justin Raimondo, editorial director of Antiwar.com, upset at the “touchy-feely” talk about Hasan’s job counseling soldiers for post-traumatic stress syndrome. “There was nothing wrong, psychologically” with Hasan – his act was “rational” and due to his anti-war attitudes as a Muslim. “It is perfectly possible,” Raimondo wrote, “Hasan was recruited into al Qaeda, a ’sleeper’ to be awakened at the right moment.”

These men were both pouring gasoline on the embers of 9/11, when we should be tamping down the madness. Instead of whipping up another Muslim demonization cycle or misguided support for armed anti-war resistance, we should take a deep breath and, with Sontag’s words in mind, ask ourselves how the nation got bogged down in an endless War on Terror and two counterinsurgency wars of occupation.

This time, let’s try something new and try to understand the thing rather than acting like a bull pawing the dust in front of a red cape. Let’s put Hasan on trial, and let’s be as open as possible and share information with the American people as we do it. The obsession for secrecy established by the Bush administration is something Americans have the strength to back away from. To paraphrase a famous quote, Americans can handle the truth.

If Hasan exchanged e-mails with someone connected to al Qaeda, fine. But let’s finally have the courage to honestly assess just what the heck the al Qaeda boogeyman really is.

Many very smart people have for a long time seen it as an overblown network of dangerous people – angry at things the U.S. and its western allies have done in their lands.

Let’s try something new and take people like Osama bin Laden at their word. For instance, bin Laden has written that his goal is to make us spend ourselves into bankruptcy. If that’s true, then let’s suck it up and not escalate our war in Afghanistan.

Let’s remove our troops and help facilitate a stable relationship between India and Pakistan, a bitter rivalry that contributes hugely to Afghanistan’s instability. This would advance regional stability much better than more troops and predator drones. Being a military provocateur in the region aggravates the India-Pakistan problem and does nothing to lessen the grotesque corruption that plagues Pakistan.

As for Hasan, for our own good, let’s ask how an otherwise reportedly decent man who at least initially seemed eager to serve his country was put in a bind that led to mass murder. And let’s do it even if he exchanged e-mails with people who Lieberman calls “Islamic extremists.”

Belief is not illegal here. Acts are. It does no reasonable American any good to turn Hasan’s crime into a witch hunt that provokes more hatred.

Co-workers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center reportedly thought Hasan was “psychotic,” suggesting the military was remiss in not discharging him. In hindsight, it’s clear he should’ve been dealt with.

But if we’re going to purge soldiers for psychotic behavior, let’s not focus only on those opposed to our wars. Considering Abu Ghraib and other atrocities, it’s clear there are plenty of psychotics in our ranks friendly to wars in Muslim countries.

Beyond all the reaction, there’s a profound lesson in the narrative of Hasan. We need to be coolheaded, fair-minded and smart enough to recognize it.

Why was there no apparent avenue for someone like Hasan with such a clear and pronounced moral conflict vis-a-vis U.S. war policy to be classified as a conscientious objector? His government-paid skills could have been used somewhere other than a war zone in a Muslim country.

The fact of heinous murder is easy to grasp in Hasan’s case, and he’ll pay dearly. The more difficult but possibly more useful lesson may be in how and why U.S. war policy is able to turn an apparently decent man into a bloodthirsty killer.

John Grant is a Vietnam vet and member of Veterans for Peace. E-mail: grantphoto@comcast.net .