>Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 15:28:56 -0700
>From: "Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: The Israel-Palestine Road Map
>To: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
>
>THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE ROAD MAP
>
>MoveOn Bulletin
>Friday, June 20, 2003
>Noah T. Winer, Editor
><mailto:[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]
>
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><http://moveon.org/s?i=1463-673038-ARajaXEIsvTxYohcajkkqA>http://moveon.org/s?i=1463-673038-ARajaXEIsvTxYohcajkkqA
>
>------------------------------
>
>SPECIAL FEATURE: GRASSROOTS INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL ELLSBERG
>This week, the second of our new Grassroots Interviews. Daniel
>Ellsberg leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971,
>exposing the U.S. government's motives for involvement in the
>Vietnam War. Last fall, he published "Secrets," which relates his
>changing attitudes toward Vietnam and raises crucial questions of
>government transparency in times of war. Ellsberg has responsed to
>five of the top questions written and ranked by MoveOn members over
>the last two weeks. Here's an excerpt:
>
>"Are we 'only' 5%, 10%, of the population? Isn't that five to ten
>million adults? One percent? A million. More than that were in
>demonstrations, in this country alone: as part of a far larger
>global movement, the largest worldwide protest ever seen before or
>during any war! That's enough activists to move and change any
>country in the world, even (with courage) a police state. And we're
>far from that, yet. We can avert that real danger if we continue
>using to the fullest all the freedoms we still have."
>
>The rest of <#10>Mr. Ellsberg's responses follow this week's bulletin.
>
>------------------------------
>
>CONTENTS
>1. <#1>Introduction: Where Does the Road Map Lead?
>2. <#2>One Link
>3. <#3>Read the Road Map
>4. <#4>Critique
>5. <#5>Facts on the Ground: Terrorism
>6. <#6>Facts on the Ground: Outposts and Settlements
>7. <#7>Facts on the Ground: The Separation Wall
>8. <#8>Conclusion
>9. <#9>Credits
>10. <#10>Grassroots Interview: Daniel Ellsberg
>11. <>About the Bulletin
>
>------------------------------
>
>INTRODUCTION: WHERE DOES THE ROAD MAP LEAD?
>In July, 2000 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak broke off talks with
>Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat at the Camp David
>summit hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton. That September, Ariel
>Sharon, chairman of the Likud party, made a provocative visit to the
>Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Control over this holy
>site for both Muslims and Jews is contested by Palestinians and
>Israelis. The visit implied Israeli sovereignty over all Jerusalem,
>the eastern portion of which is considered occupied territory by the
>international community. So began the second intifada, or
>Palestinian uprising.
>
>As in the first intifada in the late 1980s, the demand is for an end
>to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East
>Jerusalem -- which has persisted since 1967 -- and acknowledgment of
>the Palestinian refugees right to return to the villages from which
>they were forced to leave during the 1948 war that established the
>State of Israel. In the 33 months since, human death has saturated
>the region: <http://www.israel.org/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ia50>816 Israelis
>and <http://www.palestinercs.org/intifadasummary.htm>2,384
>Palestinians have been killed.
>
>Early in his presidency, George W. Bush avoided substantial
>involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict. After September 11,
>2001 a number of factors -- escalating violence in the area and
>Israel's attempt to link September 11th with Palestinian suicide
>bombings, pressure from the Israel lobby and the Christian Right,
>and the desire for an increasing U.S. influence in the oil-rich
>Middle East -- prompted Bush to take an active, personal role in
>promoting an agreement.
>
>That proposed agreement is the Road Map. While the initiative has
>been praised for calling for an end to violence and for endorsing
>the formation a Palestinian state, the Road Map provides no
>mechanism for actually ending the violence, leaves uncertain the
>borders of the proposed state, and postpones determining the status
>of the <http://www.moveon.org/r?451>380,000 Israeli settlers and
><http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/whois.html>four million
>Palestinian refugees. With matters so central to the resolution of
>the conflict left to be decided at a future date or ignored
>entirely, the Road Map is still far from being a bona fide peace
>proposal.
>
>True and lasting peace begins with justice for all the people of the
>region. That the Road Map will lead in that direction is not at all
>evident.
>
>------------------------------
>
>ONE LINK
>>From the UK Guardian, a good summary of the Israel-Palestine Road
>>Map. The one flaw is the claim that the Israeli government has
>>accepted the Road Map; in fact, it has only conditionally accepted
>>the Road Map, maintaining 14 reservations.
><http://www.guardian.co.uk/theissues/article/0,6512,679445,00.html>http://www.guardian.co.uk/theissues/article/0,6512,679445,00.html
>
>------------------------------
>
>READ THE ROAD MAP
>The Road Map itself is only a few pages long with few details.
>Drafted under the auspices of the Quartet -- the United States,
>European Union, United Nations, and Russia -- the Road Map envisions
>three phases of negotiation, resulting in the end of the
>Israel-Palestine conflict and a permanent status agreement in 2005.
><http://www.moveon.org/r?452>http://www.moveon.org/r?452
>
>------------------------------
>
>CRITIQUE
>>From the only joint Palestinian-Israeli public policy think-tank in
>>the world:
>"The Road Map is severely lacking in detail. It mentions that the
>sides will have to negotiate the permanent status issues such as
>borders, Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, etc. but makes almost no
>mention of these issues throughout the process in the earlier
>phases."
><http://www.ipcri.org/files/roadmapgb.html>http://www.ipcri.org/files/roadmapgb.html
>
>  >From the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz:
>"According to the facts on the ground, the [Palestinian] 'state'
>will apparently be comprised of three enclaves cut off from one
>another inside the West Bank -- in addition to the Gazan enclave,
>and with no guarantee the settlements inside the enclave will be
>dismantled. The 'separation fence' has been described as
>'temporary,' but it is a wall with hefty fortifications taking up a
>lot of land, and it has already scarred the Tul Karm-Qalqiliyah
>area, the most prosperous Palestinian farmland, thus sabotaging one
>of the cornerstones of Palestinian economic security."
><http://www.moveon.org/r?456>http://www.moveon.org/r?456
>
>  >From The Nation:
>"For in failing to focus on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,
>Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, about to enter its 37th year, and on
>Israeli settlements, which underpin that occupation, the Road Map
>misses an opportunity to end this conflict. Instead, it concentrates
>on Palestinian violence and how to combat it -- as if it came out of
>nowhere, and as if, were it to be halted, the situation of
>occupation and settlement would be normal."
><http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030609&s=khalidi>
>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030609&s=khalidi
>
>------------------------------
>
>FACTS ON THE GROUND: TERRORISM
>Human Rights Watch condemns suicide bombing attacks against Israeli
>civilians as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
><http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/isrl-pa/>http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/isrl-pa/
>
>Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group, on the Rantisi assassination attempt.
><http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article254.html>http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article254.html
>
>An Israeli parliament member and 25 former Israeli generals have
>raised questions about the timing of Sharon's assassination attempt.
><http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0612-05.htm>http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0612-05.htm
>
>Senator Dick Lugar (R-Indiana), chairman of the Senate Foreign
>Relations Committee, has raised the possibility of U.S. military
>intervention "to root out the terrorism that is at the heart of the
>problem."
><http://www.moveon.org/r?453>http://www.moveon.org/r?453
>
>------------------------------
>
>FACTS ON THE GROUND: OUTPOSTS AND SETTLEMENTS
>>From the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz:
>"Don't make do with the outposts. There are more than 100 of them,
>and about 60 went up in Sharon's days. If he takes down 7-10 he
>hasn't done a thing. Many were put up just to pull them out, like a
>goat from a crowded corral."
><http://www.moveon.org/r?454>http://www.moveon.org/r?454
>
>  >From The Nation:
>"A recent poll by Israel's Jaffee Institute for Strategic Studies
>shows that 56 percent of Israelis -- up from 48 percent last year --
>would 'support a unilateral withdrawal from the territories in the
>context of a peace accord, even if that meant ceding all
>settlements.' Here is the signpost for a realistic road map that
>could be charted by the Bush Administration."
><http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030630&s=carey>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030630&s=carey
>
>------------------------------
>
>FACTS ON THE GROUND: THE SEPARATION WALL
>Gush Shalom reports that the separation wall Israel is constructing
>in the West Bank is not at all along the internationally recognized
>1967 "green line" border. The wall, officially being built for
>security, annexes illegal settlements into Israel.
><http://www.gush-shalom.org/thewall/>http://www.gush-shalom.org/thewall/
>
>A troubling report on the 25-foot tall separation wall from Israeli
>newspaper Yediot Ahronot describes how the system of barbed concrete
>walls and armed watchtowers will imprison hundreds of thousands of
>Palestinians without access to their agricultural lands.
><http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1546.shtml>http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1546.shtml
>
>The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the
>Environment on legal efforts to block the wall.
><http://www.lawsociety.org/Press/Preleases/2002/oct/oct15e.html>http://www.lawsociety.org/Press/Preleases/2002/oct/oct15e.html
>
>------------------------------
>
>CONCLUSION: ALTERNATIVE MAPS
>Eyad El Sarraj is the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health
>Program in Gaza City. His vision for peace involves addressing the
>issues of mistrust and despair in order to cease violence.
><http://www.bitterlemons.org/previous/bl260503ed20.html#is2>http://www.bitterlemons.org/previous/bl260503ed20.html#is2
>
>Yakov M. Rabkin is a professor of history at the University of
>Montreal. He describes how Israel-Palestine could become neither a
>Jewish state, nor an Arab state, but a state of all its citizens.
><http://www.moveon.org/r?455>http://www.moveon.org/r?455
>
>------------------------------
>
>CREDITS
>Research team:
>Leah Appet, Lisa Bhungalia, Lita Epstein, Russ Juskalian, Janelle
>Miau, Anugraha Palan, Christina Schofield, Ryan Senser, and Ora
>Szekely.
>
>Editing team:
>David Taub Bancroft, Madlyn Bynum, Melinda Coyle, Nancy Evans,
>Eileen Gillan, Judy Green, Mary Anne Henry, Vicki Nikolaidis,
>Rebecca Sulock, and Rita Weinstein.
>
>------------------------------
>
>GRASSROOTS INTERVIEW: DANIEL ELLSBERG
>The following are the personal responses of Daniel Ellsberg to the
>top-ranked questions MoveOn members posed last week:
>
>First, let me say that the messages accompanying the questions
>below, and many of the others, are eloquent, impassioned, and very
>well-informed despite perplexities that I fully share. I'm grateful
>to have had the opportunity to read them. To be reminded that there
>are American citizens so thoughtful and so concerned both to
>understand and to alleviate our condition has the same effect for me
>of witnessing and taking part in the large demonstrations and
>actions of civil disobedience during the first stage of the ongoing
>war in Iraq. It sustains my hope that we have a chance to avert the
>disasters this administration is heading for at home and abroad.
>
>As those demonstrations did for me, and I'm sure for other
>participants, these letters remind me that although those of us who
>actively oppose this war of aggression and occupation -- and the
>ominous abridgements of the Bill of Rights that are accompanying it
>-- are only a small proportion of the American public: We are
>America, too, and there are a lot of us.
>
>Are we "only" 5%, 10%, of the population? Isn't that five to ten
>million adults? One percent? A million. More than that were in
>demonstrations, in this country alone: as part of a far larger
>global movement, the largest worldwide protest ever seen before or
>during any war! That's enough activists to move and change any
>country in the world, even (with courage) a police state. And we're
>far from that, yet. We can avert that real danger if we continue
>using to the fullest all the freedoms we still have.
>
>On to the questions:
>
>1. Should a special prosecutor investigate charges of racketeering
>by members of the Bush administration who personally profited from
>the war on Iraq?
>-- Gerald Kleiner, Middletown, New York, USA
>
>I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a defendant -- so I consulted movement
>lawyers, one of whom helped me look up the RICO Act:
><http://caselaw.1p.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/18/parts/i/chapters/96/toc.html>http://caselaw.1p.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/18/parts/i/chapters/96/toc.html.
>Another lawyer who is familiar with that act confirmed my layman's
>sense, as I read it, that it would be quite a stretch, legally, to
>apply that particular statute to the war-profiteering of this
>administration's favorite firms. If you happen on an adventurous
>prosecutor who wants to take it on, good luck! But it doesn't really
>look like a promising approach.
>
>Your mention of racketeering in this context, though, sent me onto
>the web to recapture a staggering quotation by the Marine hero Major
>General Smedley Butler, summing up his thirty-years of service
>largely in U.S. colonial wars from Nicaragua and Cuba to China:
>"During that time I spent most of my time being a high class
>muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In
>short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism...The best (Al
>Capone) could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I
>operated on three continents." Look up the whole quote, which would
>have been an eye-opener for me if I had read it when I was in the
>Marines: www.fas.org/man/smedley.htm. Butler doesn't mention there
>that in colonial operations in Mexico (Vera Cruz) and Haiti he was
>awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor. How many medals will be
>won, some posthumously, by pre-enlightened American officers and
>troops in Iraq and elsewhere, now that we've extended our protection
>rackets from the Caribbean to the Persian Gulf?
>
>My lawyer friend points out that it will be hard to find that
>businessmen broke any laws in their current profiteering, since it
>was effectively businessmen who wrote the laws. The secret, no-bid
>contracts awarded to Cheney's Halliburton and George Shultz's
>Bechtel (and WorldCom! As Molly Ivins exposes in her column Friday
>on the Iraq Gold Rush) certainly deserve congressional examination.
>Fat chance. But take the effort to thank journalists like Ivins and
>Arianna Huffington who bring sunlight onto these scavengers and use
>their information in letters to the editor and call-in shows, to
>reopen the discussion of corporate scandals and influence that was
>interrupted, not by coincidence, by war on Iraq.
>
>2. Why can't Bush and Cheney be impeached?
>-- Susan Petry, Durham, North Carolina, USA
>
>The familiar metaphor seems painfully apt here. As the world can
>see, Uncle Sam is holding a smoking gun, above a stricken nation in
>the Middle East; and despite his claim of self-defense -- the need
>to beat an aggressor to the draw -- no weapons of mass destruction
>are to be found on the victim.
>
>Thanks to an unprecedented flood of leaks from the intelligence
>community, it is increasingly clear that whatever the personal
>beliefs of the officials claiming to "know," to be "absolutely
>convinced" that Saddam Hussein "possessed weapons" that were an
>intolerable threat to us and his neighbors -- from Bush and Powell
>and Rumsfeld to Wolowitz--their statements about the secret
>evidential basis for these confident assertions were wildly
>misleading. Those assurances -- which were critical to justifying,
>on grounds of "necessity," a "preemptive" war that would otherwise
>appear blatantly criminal--look like lies. (See an excellent
>discussion in this week's New Republic, by John Judis and Spencer
>Ackerman: "The Selling of the War: The First Casualty."
><http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030630&s=ackermanjudis063003>http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030630&s=ackermanjudis063003)
>Exactly so, their claims of "bullet-proof" evidence of significant
>links of Iraq to 9-11. If so, we were lied into war. Tens of
>thousands of Iraqis -- including more innocent civilians than were
>murdered (not by Saddam Hussein) on 9-11 -- were lied to death,
>along with American KIA in numbers that are increasing week by week
>(and will continue to increase, I believe, every week that George W.
>Bush and Richard Cheney remain in office).
>
>That's a serious charge. But I'm prepared to believe it on the basis
>of my own experience, not only in Vietnam -- which is looking
>painfully relevant to our prospects in the occupation of Iraq -- but
>in Washington under Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson. I
>watched -- and, I'm sorry to say, kept my mouth shut outside the
>Pentagon -- as they lied Congress into a delegation of war powers by
>claiming certainty about an unprovoked attack on our warships (See
><http://www.ellsberg.net/sample.htm>http://www.ellsberg.net/sample.htm).
>I knew at the time that the evidence for that attack was highly
>ambiguous: just like, it appears, evidence before the war that
>Saddam still possessed and had deployed WMD's. In fact, there had
>been no attack at all, but Congress scarcely suspected that for
>years: I didn't tell them, nor did anyone else in the Executive
>branch who had reached that conclusion. Suspicions of the total
>absence of WMD's have emerged, this time, within months of the
>exaggerated claims.
>
>Was that manipulation in 1964 an impeachable offense? I would say
>flatly yes: of the most serious kind. Likewise if President Bush and
>his vice president and cabinet officers (all, by the way, subject to
>impeachment) are guilty of the same misrepresentation of the secret
>intelligence available to them in their justification for a war
>unauthorized by the UN Charter and Security Council. I personally
>suspect that's true. That doesn't mean that I see any prospect
>whatever that this Republican Congress (or the majority of these
>Democrats!) would actually impeach or convict this President for
>this war, no matter what evidence is produced. Yet I think it's
>important for our democracy, and our security, to argue forcefully
>right now that lying us into war -- as has happened before -- was
>and would be now a high crime, an impeachable offense.
>
>So far our evidence that this has happened is almost entirely from
>leaks (as was true in 1971, with the Pentagon Papers). Not enough
>has been disclosed yet to call credibly for impeachment, which
>amounts to indictment. To raise the issue of Executive
>accountability, yes. To investigate, certainly.
>
>The current MoveOn petition drive has it exactly right: only citizen
>pressure on Congress to establish an independent bipartisan
>commission will provide a basis for Executive accountability. The
>currently-planned "review" in secret sessions of the Senate
>Intelligence Committee (the Republican chairman will not even let it
>be called an "investigation"!), confined to the performance of the
>intelligence agencies, will not do that job. Republicans, under
>White House pressure, will resist our calls for an independent
>commission, or even for open hearings in other relevant committees.
>But our own citizens' pressure, which should start now (good ad last
>week, MoveOn!) to investigate how we got into this quagmire and
>whether there was official betrayal of the public trust will get
>harder to resist as weeks and months go by of continued bloodletting
>and growing opposition in Iraq to our occupation.
>
>3. What do we, as a nation, have to do to stop this type of abuse of
>power, corruption, conflict of interest, lying, cheating,
>powermongering, and fraudulent behavior?
>-- N. Webster, Pasadena, California, USA
>
>The founders of our nation, the drafters of our Constitution and
>Bill of Rights, had better answers to these age-old problems of
>Executive abuse of power than the world had ever seen before, and
>better than we've been taught to accept in the last sixty years of
>Cold War and hot wars. Their distrust of mortals in power, their
>insights on the need for checks and balances, separation of powers,
>impeachment, constitutional guarantees of citizens' rights as
>against legislative or executive authority, have been steadily
>obscured and repressed on spurious grounds of national security. The
>effect has been to make the president just what the founders meant
>to prevent: an elected monarch. Or, as it turns out this year, a
>nearly-elected emperor.
>
>If monarchy is corrupting -- and it is -- wait till you see what
>overt empire does to us. It's time to read Tom Paine again (another
>good website, as it happens) and wake up from our dreams of kingship
>and lording it over others, to reconstruct a republic. The
>Constitution, as written and amended, really deserves our loyalty
>and our defense of it, against all enemies foreign and domestic: and
>this administration has within it more domestic enemies of the
>Constitution and Bill of Rights than any we've seen before. They've
>got to go; but that's just a start, for our recovery from an
>addiction to arms-building and (till just now, covert) empire.
>
>Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their
>abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively
>to the Congress. (See Abraham Lincoln -- before he became president
>himself -- writing from Congress in 1848: "The provision of the
>Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated,
>as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been
>involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending
>generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the
>object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of
>all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the
>Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this
>oppression upon us."
><http://www.watchpost.org/lincoln.htm>http://www.watchpost.org/lincoln.htm).
>
>Except for 123 House members and 23 Senators, members of Congress,
>Republican and Democratic (including several presidential
>candidates) covered themselves with shame by giving the president,
>with no hearings and scant deliberation or debate, an undated,
>unconstitutional, declaration of war. This was some improvement over
>1964 -- when only two Senators voted against the equivalent Tonkin
>Gulf Resolution -- and considerably better than their own
>performance one year earlier in September, 2001, when exactly one
>lawmaker, Barbara Lee of Oakland, had the conscience and courage to
>vote against giving the president, without prior hearings or debate,
>almost-unlimited power to go to war (in Afghanistan, or wherever he
>might claim a link to 9-11: Rumsfeld, we now know, wanted invade
>Iraq right away, but was put off). But in 2001 and 2002 the majority
>didn't even have the excuse that the president had lied to them,
>like Lyndon Johnson in 1964, about his intent to cash this blank
>check for war. (Bush appears to have lied only about his reasons).
>The Vietnam quagmire got Congress to enact (over Nixon's veto) the
>War Powers Act, which remained an abdication of the constitutional
>responsibilities of Congress and which subsequently elected kings
>all ignored. With the Iraq fiasco (as I believe it will soon appear)
>let's educate our fellow citizens to demand a return to the
>Constitution.
>
>4. How can the people take a stance against unjust wars when the
>media and Congress play a complicit role in either keeping the truth
>from the public or refusing to question supposed "evidence" without
>demanding proof?
>-- April Cartright, Lake Worth, Florida, USA
>
>Why did not one of Barbara Lee's Congressional colleagues -- many of
>whom had districts as safe as hers -- join her in voting against an
>unconstitutional delegation of their war powers, without
>deliberation? Many of them, she told me, had assured her they would
>vote with her up till the moment of the vote; she was startled to
>find herself alone. Her guess was that they were afraid, at the
>moment of truth, to be accused, however unjustly, of lack of
>patriotism, of disloyalty to the president, even of treason. (She
>got all those charges. They were nearly all from outside her own
>district. But those words aren't easy for any American, or anyone,
>to hear: as I can testify). But she did what she knew was right. And
>courage is contagious. A year later, against the next Tonkin
>Gulf-like Resolution for Iraq, she and Dennis Kucinich organized 123
>votes in favor of the Constitution.
>
>Lincoln's comment above related to what he saw as President Polk's
>illegal and deceptive provocation of war with Mexico, which he
>opposed as a Congressman. His later Commander of the Union Army,
>Ulysses S. Grant, saw that war the same way, when he participated in
>it as a second lieutenant. In his memoirs he described that war as
>"one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker
>nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example
>of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire
>to acquire additional territory."
>
>He describes the process of getting into a war of aggression against
>Mexico in terms very familiar to me from our "reprisal" against the
>supposed Tonkin Gulf attack and later "retaliation" for attacks at
>Pleiku and Qui Nhon, and their effects on Congressional opposition.
>"We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico
>should commence it. It was very doubtful whether Congress would
>declare war; but if Mexico should attack our troops, the executive
>could announce, ÔWhereas, war exists by the acts of, etc.," and
>prosecute the contest with vigor. Once initiated there were but few
>public men who would have the courage to oppose it. Experience
>proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is
>engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupied no enviable
>place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate
>Ôwar, pestilence, and famine,' than to act as obstructionist to a
>war already begun."
>
>Lincoln, nicknamed "Spotty" at the time for his Spot Resolutions
>against the Mexican war, was denouncd as "unpatriotic" by his own
>Whig party in his home district in Illinois, to which he was
>returned after one two-year term in the House. Grant served in the
>war he opposed, but he looked back later on a heavy national price:
>"The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican
>war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their
>transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and
>expensive war of modern times."
>(<http://home.nycap.rr.com/history/grant1.html#Ch-4>http://home.nycap.rr.com/history/grant1.html#Ch-4)
>
>A quote on the subject by Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy in the
>Nazi regime, interviewed by a psychologist during his trial at
>Nuremburg in 1943, has been going around the Internet over the last
>six months, but usually in a truncated form that leaves out its
>direct reference to U.S. democracy. Here's the whole quote, from G.
>M. Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary (N.Y. 1947, pp. 278-279), Gilbert being
>the psychologist, an American intelligence office who spoke German:
>
>We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary
>to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very
>thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
>"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why
>would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when
>the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in
>one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in
>Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in
>Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of
>the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple
>matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a
>fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
>"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people
>have some say in the matter through their elected representatives,
>and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
>"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people
>can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy.
>All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce
>the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to
>danger. It works the same way in any country." At this moment, many
>of us firmly believe, it is the policies of our president and his
>advisors, not our own skepticism and protest, that are exposing this
>country to increased danger: danger of initiating unnecessary,
>illegal and stalemated or escalating wars; danger of vengeful
>terrorist attacks (exploiting U.S. vulnerabilities he has neglected
>to mend and a flow of recruits his wars will swell); and increased
>danger of nuclear proliferation, eventually to such terrorist groups.
>There is a personal and national price to be paid by silence and
>passive obedience, in the face of such folly, that is greater than
>the pain of being called names, greater even than the loss of a job
>or career. It is the price of participating in and failing to expose
>and resist national disasters, unnecessary and wrongful wars. That
>was the price -- of accepting a definition of patriotism as
>unquestioning support of national Executive leadership -- paid in
>Hitler's Germany, Emperor Hirohito's Japan (see John Dower in this
>week's Nation on the myths that evoked patriotic support for Japan's
>"liberation" of Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia, and its
>"pre-emptive" attack on Pearl Harbor
>(<http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=771>http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=771),
>in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. invasion of
>Vietnam: and now Iraq. It's up to us -- it's time for us -- to prove
>Goering wrong: it doesn't have to work that way in our country.
>
>5. How can we best convince the public that they're being deceived?
>-- Rosemarie Pilkington, Staten Island, New York, USA
>
>By spreading the word in every way -- in email to our friends,
>letters to the editor, call-ins to talk radio, in every discussion
>and argument -- that they can inform themselves on matters of public
>policy far better on the Internet than on American TV, mainstream
>radio (including NPR) or any individual newspaper. The last six
>months of an extended book tour and political lecturing and activism
>all over the country has revealed to me that the large minority of
>Americans opposed to the Iraq war -- largely Internet users, I
>strongly suspect-- live in an entirely different world of
>information from those who actively or passively supported the war,
>who rely almost entirely on presidential declarations and sources
>strikingly shaped by official spin.
>
>Daily on the websites like antiwar.com, commondreams.org,
>buzzflash.com, I find a compilation of critical, relevant,
>informative news stories and editorial comment from all over the
>country and abroad which adds up, over time, to something closer to
>an adequate understanding of current policies and events than was
>ever available to any public in the past. Ironically, most of the
>items on these sites do come, after all, from mainstream newspapers
>in America; but the impact of access to a broad collection of
>probing or critical stories on a daily basis is very different from
>reading one or two such analyses or stories in a given hometown
>newspaper, even a relatively good one. Moreover, through these sites
>and through direct links to the British Guardian, the Independent,
>the BBC and CBC (far better than American public radio or TV), and
>other international news sources in English, Americans can have
>access not only to other points of view but to news and commentary
>that is often better informed than we can get in mainstream sources
>at home.
>
>So the answer to the question (and a number of others like it) is:
>We should do what we can to expand the daily readership of these
>sites, and others like them, enormously. Our ability to publicize
>and expand these sources of information (including relevant history;
>see my references above) is the informational and educational
>equivalent of the organizational tactics of MoveOn, United for
>Peace, and other activist sites.
>
>Still, it's very hard to get the majority of people in this country,
>like any other, to believe that their elected leaders are
>dangerously deceiving them (routine as that actually is: a secret
>well-kept by insiders who want to remain or come back as insiders).
>To get them to accept that -- to believe it to the point that they
>will take up the burdens and risks of opposing that leadership in
>committed and effective ways -- takes unusual evidence. It takes
>more than news stories citing unidentified or unofficial sources,
>even from those who were recently insiders. It takes documents:
>large amounts of them. And in the "national security" realm, such
>documents (above all, those demonstrating deception of the public,
>or major errors, or possible crimes) will be classified.
>Congressional hearings can get at some of those, but only up to a
>point; any administration will strive, usually successfully, to keep
>such documents (or testimony relating to them) away from Congress
>altogether, or to postpone their release to the public till they are
>no longer dramatically pertinent.
>
>MoveOn member Andy Ayers has asked me: "Are we dependent on another
>whistle-blower insider this administration" to act as I did with the
>Pentagon Papers in 1971? My answer is yes, but with a difference. I
>would say -- as I have been saying since last September to every
>audience I've addressed, in hopes my message may reach their friends
>and relatives in the federal government -- we need someone to act as
>I should have done, but did not, long before 1971, when the
>documents in my safe were current.
>
>"Don't do what I did; don't wait till the bombs are falling," I was
>saying to potential hearers in government from October through
>mid-March. "If you know that your bosses and the President are lying
>about their reasons for this war, or about what they are being told
>about its prospects and danger and costs, and if you possess
>documents that demonstrate that, I urge you to consider doing what I
>wish I had done in 1964 or 1965: go to Congress and the press, with
>those documents, and tell the truth."
>
>We are hearing now important leaks, mostly anonymous, complaining of
>undue administration pressure on intelligence estimates and of
>misrepresentation and misuse of intelligence. It would have been
>helpful to hear more of those earlier, but I'm in no position to
>criticize; as my memoir spells out, it took me years of war to reach
>that point or go beyond it, and when I did I no longer had access to
>documents that bore on current White House decision-making. (If I
>had, I would have released those instead of the history in the
>Pentagon Papers).
>
>It's possible for others in the government now to do better than
>that. To kick-start a stalled process of Congressional
>investigation, and the public campaign of pressure to pursue those
>investigations, some with official access must take the
>responsibility for releasing, without higher authorization, hundreds
>or thousands of pages of documents they believe, on their
>experienced judgment, to demonstrate official deception or
>wrongdoing, without harming national security. I'm confident there
>are men and women in this administration with access to documents of
>that nature and with the personal courage and sense of conscience
>and patriotism to do that, if they reflect on that possibility and
>the stakes involved. It would mean risking or sacrificing their
>clearances and careers, perhaps going to prison. It could save
>several wars' worth of lives, and democracy in this country.
>
>------------------------------
>
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--


Alison Croggon

Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com

Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/

Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/