Obama & His French Poodle Back Off

Dear Mr. President,
What it all boils down to is the argument that, unless you do something to punish Assad, Western credibility is threatened, i.e., the emperor has no clothes! But as the lead editorial in today’s NYT (“Absent on Syria”) puts it, “As President Obama moves toward unilateral military action in response to a chemical weapons attack in Syria…he is doing so without legal justification and without the backing of …Congress and the United Nations Security Council.” A front page story, “Experts Fear U.S. Plan to Strike Syria Overlooks Risks” lays out a number of things that could go wrong including the possibility that it might broaden the regional conflict or even “open the door to a takeover by rebels linked to Al Qaeda.” Whoops! You got no legitimacy for doing anything. You got no backing except for your French poodle Hollande, and you got no chance of changing anything in the Syrian civil war except to cause more misery. Unleashing 216 cruise missiles (a 6th destroyer is now on station in the eastern Mediterranean) is not going to punish Assad. It’ll kill a lot of people, blow up a lot of stuff, but it won’t do a thing to Assad or his military. What would do a whole lot more good is to stop arming both sides. Why not try diplomacy for a change instead of cruise missiles? Put pressure on Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf states to stop arming the rebels and on Iran and Russia to stop arming Assad. That’s the way to gain credibility, not blowing shit up and killing people. You showed you could pressure the world in your misguided effort to snag Snowden, why not give it a shot in an effort at peace? That’s what a real Nobel Peace Prize winner would do. And here’s something else to ponder: “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” Your words to the Boston Globe in 2007 before you were elected president and before you were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
    Stop the presses! This just in. You decided to launch military strikes against Syria but want Congress to authorize them. You suddenly realized that when you yelled Charge! nobody was following you? And in response to your turnaround, House leaders say, “We’re on vacation. We’ll be back September 9.” Sort of like a cooling off period, right? So what happens if Congress says, No? I know, it’s unlikely these bozos will do the right thing, but what if?

Obama Ascends Mount Olympus

Dear Mr. President,

You must be feeling like Zeus sitting up on Mount Olympus hurling thunderbolts right now, showing the world who’s got the biggest cojones, a demigod on steroids. Wow! This is way better than Kill List Tuesday! All your assets in place, 180 cruise missiles locked and loaded, ready to go. You’re going to show that sonofabitch Assad who’s boss. You told him a year ago not to do it and he did it. How dare he disobey. Never mind there’s no link from the chemical attack to him; never mind the evidence is thin, just one intercepted phone call between Syrian commanders who appear to have miscalculated, although you dismiss the miscalculation part. Never mind that the UN chemical weapons team hasn’t even said what the stuff was. Never mind that there’s some possibility it might have been the opposition, not the military. You got the Syrians—opposition and pro-government, military and civilians alike, running for cover. You got Ban Ki-moon pleading not to do it. You got Congress saying, Hey, wait a minute, let us play in the sandbox, too. But you got nobody except France and Turkey for a coalition of the willing. Never mind. You got all those thunderbolts, so what the hell, why not, right? Never mind the law of unintended consequences. Never mind the niceties of law, treaties, the Constitution. Might makes right, right? You even admit a military strike won’t really have any effect except to redraw that line in the sand you drew a year ago. That sounds like petulance to me, Mr. President, not to mention arrogant and delusional. What I see here is a replay of 2003 writ small. There’s the supposed intelligence, the WMDs, the UN inspectors’ work unfinished and ignored, the Secretary of State telling us the evidence is solid and the legal justification clear—both “evidence” and “legal justification” too secret to reveal—and the Secretary of Defense saying, We’re ready, boss, the Navy waiting for orders to push the button, and the Syrians, civilians, opposition fighters, soldiers, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons who’ve already suffered 2 years of carnage, waiting for more destruction to rain down on them from Amerika. Pretty heady stuff, right, Mr. President? But this is not right and this is not just. It’s no different than the reckless lawlessness and hubris of your predecessor; what you railed against before you ascended the throne. Peace and the brotherhood of man, Martin Luther King’s vision and hope for the future, is still nothing but a dream.

A Time to Break Silence: Part 2

Dear Mr. President,

While Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was both visionary and inspirational, his anti-war speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” was a call for a revolutionary shift in values “from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society,” Until we do that, he said, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” In that speech, he clearly revealed the falseness of war, the lies that are its foundation, the myths that glamorize and promote it, and the hypocrisy of politicians who decry aggression (or terrorism) and promise peace and security while dropping bombs on a country 8,000 miles away. (Vietnam then, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and, perhaps, Syria today.) He reveals the ugly truth behind the war: “…none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long [our troops] must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese [or Iraqis or Afghanis or…] and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor.” Finally, one last quote: “There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.” The pursuit of peace, Mr. President, wisdom from a visionary giant who devoted his entire life to the pursuit of peace. who laid his body on line for justice, equality and a vision of the brotherhood of man. There is no justification for bombing Syria, Mr. President, no core interest for America, no imminent threat, and yet you are poised to strike. It is a direct violation of Article 51 of the UN Charter, a crime of aggression. Today, the British Parliament rejected military action in Syria. Only France and Turkey are willing partners in this, our latest misadventure. The Arab League, the UN, even NATO refuses to participate. And yet the news reports indicate you will probably make a decision to go it alone. “Go it alone.” The mark of an Imperial President who has lost touch with reality, with humanity, with his own soul. We have come a long way since Dr. King gave his “I have a Dream” speech. However, we have not budged an inch since he gave the “A Time to Break Silence” speech. The Nobel Peace Prize inspired him to work even harder for peace. He would, I think, be sadly disappointed in you, Mr. President. Mortified that his life’s work has come to this.

A Time to Break Silence

Dear Mr. President,

On the eve of the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s electrifying “I Have a Dream” speech, there are many articles and analyses of its—and his—impact, but there’s another speech, “A Time to Break Silence” which is equally important and as relevant today as it was when he gave it on April 4, 1967. It was a powerful anti-Vietnam War speech, not appreciated by the Johnson Administration or any administration since. Anti-war sentiment is never popular with the power elite, for war is a path to power. I haven’t seen a single mention of the Break Silence speech and that’s a shame for there are important, indeed critical lessons we need to learn from it. Dr. King, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize recipient, saw the connection between war and poverty, between war and injustice, war and the crushing of hope and aspiration at home and abroad. Although the speech is about Vietnam, it is also about Afghanistan today, the parallels strikingly similar. Near the end he says: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” We are approaching—maybe already in—that state of spiritual death as a nation and blindly headed deeper into it, for the drums of war beat once more for “intervention,” this time in Syria. It reminds me of the runup to the invasion of Iraq—the evidence of WMDs/the evidence of chemical weapons, the list of atrocities by Saddam Hussein/the list of atrocities by the Assad regime, the moral duty to rid the world of a tyrant, etc. No talk of cutting off arms to both sides in this horrendous slaughter or finding another path to peace. You make secret deals to arm the rebels—many, jihadists, terrorists and those we deem our enemies elsewhere—who are also guilty of atrocities. Outside Europe and Washington, there is little enthusiasm for military intervention but never mind, as reported in today’s NYT (“Arab League Rejects Attack Against Syria” p. A1), “…administration officials said they did not regard the lack of an imprimatur from the Security Council or the Arab League as insurmountable hurdles given the carnage last week.” And what of the carnage we cause if we bomb them? It’s a time to break silence, Mr. President, a time to speak out against the obscenity of war, a time to put aside the false myth that violence is a path to peace. You have yet another opportunity to be worthy of that Nobel Peace Prize. I urge you to show you deserved it.

America's Search for Terrorists in the EU, the UN and 80 Embassies

Dear Mr. President,

“…the people at the NSA don’t have an interest in doing anything other than making sure that….we can prevent a terrorist attack.” Your words, August 9. But “Special Collection Service,” “Rampart-T,” “Magothy” and “Apalachee” gives the lie to your assurances. These programs, Der Spiegel reported today, have nothing to do with counterterrorism but are evidence the NSA is massively spying on the UN, the EU and heads of state—friend and foe alike—and it’s not like you didn’t know all along; you get this information in your daily briefings. (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-nsa-documents-show-how-the-us-spies-on-europe-and-the-un-a-918625.html) The innocent routine won’t work anymore. You, the sincere liar and consummate con-man has been evident close up for years but now it’s clear to the rest of the world as well. Oh, how they wanted to believe you, like you, trust you. But truth is catching up to you no matter how brutally you try to suppress it. According to Spiegel, the NSA has bugged, copied hard drives and tapped into secure computer networks of EU embassies in Washington and New York, even has direct access to their VPN, the most secure type of private network there is. And not only the EU, but the Atomic Energy Commission, UN headquarters in New York and 80 embassies around the world. That approaches god-like omniscience, Mr. President, the ability to know everyone’s secrets. But it also violates the treaties, agreements and pacts we made with the UN, the EU and our allies. What does the White House have to say about these latest revelations? “…we gather intelligence abroad just like every other nation.” Well, not really. Not on this scale. If your administration spent a fraction of the energy on promoting peace and understanding as it spends on snooping and assassination, we’d be a lot more secure. Let’s understand why 9/11 happened, why there’s so much animosity toward us and what we can do to promote peace instead of war. The roots of 9/11 and Al Qaeda were never investigated or understood. Neither was the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, or your covert wars in Yemen and Pakistan. Our ship of state got hijacked by evildoers as a result of 9/11 just like the planes that flew into the twin towers and the Pentagon—by ideologues and fanatics—and nothing has changed in 12 years except we have entered a state of perpetual war and an enduring cycle of hatred, repression and violence, and that is the real tragedy of 9/11.

Manning, Bales, Hasan: Victims of America’s Wars

Dear Mr. President,

To read the newspapers lately you’d never know there’s a war in Afghanistan; that we still have 60,000 troops there. Not one article in the NYT for weeks; only those little Names of the Dead boxes that appear occasionally, evidence that people are still fighting and dying there. Today a Polish soldier died; yesterday, 3 NATO troops were killed by a roadside bomb; Wednesday, the NYT listed First Lt. Tim Santos as the 2,246^th American casualty of the Afghan war; but the only news is about our exit by the end of 2014, how the war is winding down, how many troops we’ll leave for “training and support.” The evidence of war appears in other ways however, like collateral damage, not from abroad but here on the home front. This week Pfc. Manning was sentenced to 35 years for exposing war crimes in Iraq, Sgt. Bales received a life sentence for killing 16 unarmed Afghan civilians and Maj. Hasan was found guilty of killing 13 and wounding 32 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas. All 3 are as much victims of the war as if they were battlefield casualties. The war is coming home in more subtle and ominous ways too, ways that threaten both individual citizens and democracy itself: the morphing from a democracy to a security state. The line between military and civilian is blurred and the differences are hard to distinguish. Police forces across the land are up-armored with high tech weapons and military tactics, riot police and SWAT teams are indistinguishable from soldiers on a battlefield and there are so many overlapping and intertwined “security forces”—DHS, TSA, FBI, NSA, DEA, ATF, etc. that it’s impossible to tell one from the other. In NYC and other places it is now policy to “shoot-to-stop”—meaning kill—rather than disable and the tactics of Guantanamo have come to our prisons; in California it is now legal to force feed hunger-strikers. Technology that tracks terrorists is also used to spy on Americans, mock trials and secret laws are accepted as the new normal; the right to dissent is being systematically squelched, the right to assemble criminalized, the Constitution trampled, the government more opaque and the American people seem to accept all this with astounding passivity. There are a few pockets of resistance but they are isolated, ignored by the press, and it is almost too late, for the security forces are now so pervasive and powerful that any protest can be quickly suppressed. This is your legacy, Mr. President, the end of democracy.

Feistein Defends NSA, Trashes Snowden

Dear Senator Feinstein,

Your letter today defending the NSA and its surveillance programs is as unconvincing and wrong-headed as your letters of August 8 and 15 which also defended them. You repeat the claim that “these NSA programs are effective and have contributed to the disruption of more than 50 terrorist plots and arrests on charges of terrorism” in spite of the fact that this has been discredited repeatedly, most recently in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on July 31—the same day your op-ed appeared in the Washington Post defending the NSA and mongering fear about terrorists and how “New bombs and techniques are in the making” and we must stay on alert. Today’s NYT (“Top Secret Court Castigated NSA On Surveillance” p. A1) reports that former chief judge of the FISC, John Bates, ruled in 2011 that the NSA consistently and systematically collected and analyzed Americans’ communications without a warrant in violation of the Constitution and that there was “a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials in submissions to the secret court.” The current chief judge recently said that the secret court is totally dependent on the information NSA gives it and is ill-equipped to provide adequate oversight. It’s clear also that Congress is not protecting We the People or the Constitution from assault by the intelligence community; indeed, both the House and Senate committee chairs are in lock-step with the agencies, their fiercest defenders. In your letter today: “Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower, and I stand by my previous comments that his actions have caused serious harm to our nation's counterterrorism and intelligence gathering efforts.” I maintain that Edward Snowden is far more concerned with democracy and the nation’s security than you or Rogers or any of the other destroyers of democracy. Our security will never be won at the point of a gun or a Hellfire missile or by Special Forces kicking down doors in the dead of night or drones circling villages in the mountains and valleys of Pakistan and Yemen and Afghanistan. Security will only come when our leaders ask, Why do they hate us? and go beyond the simpleton Bush response: Because they hate freedom. When we respect them and their culture, treat them as fellow human beings, when we stop invading and spreading violence and terror, when we stop despoiling their lands and stealing their resources, supporting and arming autocrats who repress them, only then will we be secure and live in peace.