Category - Militarism

My wife and I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper yesterday. Out of respect for the paper’s request that submitted letters be otherwise unpublished, I won’t copy it here, but I will spell out some of what we were writing about.

So it started with an article about the recently successful filibuster by Senate Republicans, to prevent a vote on a bill that would allow Guantanamo Bay detainees, and other prisoners in the “war on terror,” to have access to the court system for review of their cases; that is, to return to them the right of habeus corpus that was stripped in previous legislation. (We read it in our local Valley News, but it was originally from the Washington Post.)

A Republican filibuster in the Senate yesterday shot down a bipartisan effort to restore the right of terrorism suspects to contest in federal courts their detention and treatment, underscoring the Democratic-led Congress’s difficulty with terrorism issues.
…
The detainee rights amendment was an effort to reverse a provision in last year’s Military Commissions Act that suspended the writ of habeas corpus for terrorism suspects at the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other offshore prisons.
…
The authors of last year’s bill said that advocates of such rights would open the federal courts to endless lawsuits from the nation’s worst enemies. “To start that process would be an absolute disaster for this country,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), an Air Force Reserve lawyer who was instrumental in crafting the provision in question in last year’s bill. …

FedSpending.org is a new website sponsored by effective OMB watchdog organization and Right-to-Know enforcer OMBWatch.org, which keeps an eye on the deregulatory manias of recent administrations. The new FedSpending.org website allows visitors to track Federal grants and contracts using various search criteria, e.g., location of the recipient (how about “Halliburton”), place of performance (try “Iraq”), sponsoring agency (”Defense”), and whether or not the contract was open to competitive bidding.

The Federal government was supposed to produce such a website itself, but Senator T. Stevens (Alaska) put a secret hold on the legislation. Although the hold was eventually withdrawn, the government still has not come up with the promisted user-friendly database.

Here’s the Halliburton search. Notice that you can refine the search by asking for more years and more detail.

Leave comments that describe your searches.  Ethanol?  Pharmaceuticals?

The fact that so much of what the “intelligence” community does is done in secret makes it a little hard to judge the worth of their efforts. But here are a few things to consider.

1) When they do accomplish things, it often turns out badly. Very, very badly.

2) When they don’t accomplish things, the bad results are avoided perhaps only by the grace of God (and the more cool-headed minds that stand between the U.S. intelligence community and whatever it is they are trying to accomplish). Case in point: intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programs turns out to be pretty much a bunch of junk.

Speaking of which, I liked Alexander Cockburn’s recent column on selling bridges to the New York Times. (Full column available to Nation subscribers only, but this intro is a nice taste.)

This morning’s reports on French President Chirac’s statement that, according to the NYTimes,

“what is dangerous about this situation [Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb] is not the fact of having a nuclear bomb,” he said. “Having one or perhaps a second bomb a little later, well, that’s not very dangerous.

“But what is very dangerous is proliferation. This means that if Iran continues in the direction it has taken and totally masters nuclear-generated electricity, the danger does not lie in the bomb it will have, and which will be of no use to it.”

Mr. Chirac said it would be an act of self-destruction for Iran to use a nuclear weapon against another country.

“Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?” Mr. Chirac asked. “It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed.”

There’s no doubt that this represents lame politics on Chirac’s part, since, if this is his true belief, he shouldn’t have been suggesting otherwise before now (or after, with his bungled attempts at retraction).

The 2006 Election(s)
By John J. Fitzgerald

The 2006 Election cycle has come and gone. Just like the 2006 Hurricane season it has not performed exactly as predicted, but it has left some changes in its wake. We might actually have experienced several different elections rather than just one. A lot of decision-making got formalized on the 7th of November.

Here are some of the highlights:

The following post is the text of a radio commentary I (Mike Meeropol) delivered over WAMC radio in early October.

Did you know that the US Congress has rejected efforts to punish, investigate and criminalize war profiteering?

Yes, that’s right. This past February, the House on a mostly party-line vote rejected an effort to forbid expenditures from going to any contractor, “…if the Defense contractor audit agency has determined that more than $100,000.000 of the contractor’s costs involving work in Iraq … were unreasonable.”[1]

Meanwhile, the Senate on an equally party-line vote, rejected an amendment to an appropriation bill “to prohibit profiteering and fraud relating to military action, relief and reconstruction…”[2]

What’s going on here?

By Jonathan Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

A funny thing happened on the road to liberation. The U.S. military has discovered that high unemployment among Iraqis has a lot to do with the strength of resistance to the occupation. Those parts of Iraq that suffer from the worst unemployment are also the places where militant resistance to the U.S. and its allies is the fiercest. The U.S. military’s reaction is an overt, though painfully slow-going, policy by commanders in these battle-torn areas to create jobs for Iraqis, a sort of “Keynesian militarism.”

Keynesianism, named for British economist John Maynard Keynes (pronounced “Kaynz”), is commonly distilled into the idea that governments can and should pursue “counter-cyclical” policies. These are policies that aim to boost employment and economic activity when the economy is sagging, and to tone it down when it gets overheated, to avoid a disastrous crash. Keynes famously suggested that in the face of an unemployment crisis, the government should do almost anything to create jobs, even going so far as burying money in old mines and hiring people to dig it back up.