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-Land of the Free

War is the Dumbest Thing We Humans Do, But It's Coming to America

2023-10-18

[News With Views] "War is the dumbest thing we humans do," said Captain Chuck Nash, U.S. Navy. As I sat watching his interview with Shannon Bream, I thought back on my own time trying to survive the Vietnam War. Robert McNamara concocted the Vietnam War out of some insane idea that a country 10,000 miles away needed saving by America. He convinced President Lyndon B. Johnson to go full-out with 500,000 troops, bombers, napalm, Agent Orange, aircraft carriers and more bullets than grains of sand on the beach. After Boot Camp at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1968, I figured I was a walking dead man. Forced marches, crawling under concertina wire, gas masks in huts filled with mustard gas, crawling along the ground with bomb craters blowing up within feet of me, drill sergeants crawling down my throat, fire watch, 18 hour days, shooting every kind of weapon along with grenade throwing...how do you live through war? Then, in 1968 Life Magazine published a full issue with the 300 kids that died in Nam in one week. The whole nightmare made me sick to my stomach. The Draft grabbed my college roommate right out of our room and sent him to Nam. He died in a firefight. He’s on the Vietnam Wall in D.C. I cry my eyes out every time I visit. I run my hands over his name and wonder how his life would have been if McNamara hadn’t created the War. Or, if LBJ was bright enough NOT to enter it! Or, if Westmoreland wouldn’t have been such a moron to engage us further into that hell hole. In the end, 3.3 million Vietnamese civilians and soldiers on both sides died. We lost 58,479 young men. Another 150,000 of our young men suffered from P.T.S.D., horrible injuries and drug addiction. The Vietnam War brought drug addiction to America. All of it for what? What was accomplished? Nothing but death! Once the Viet Cong controlled the country, how many did they murder? We know 2.5 million (5% of the population) fled... Now, Israel fights for its life. You’ve got a bunch of Hamas Muslim fanatics, in fact, all Muslims are fanatics Nonsense. Too many, yes, but not all. for Sharia Law and the Qur’an. There’s not another religion on this planet as deadly as Islam. "Convert or kill all non-believers, especially the Jews," commands the Qur’an. Why the Jews? What’s the beef? What’s the reason? Tradition. And the living witness that their vision of the one god is not strong enough to persuade all of those who bound themselves to the original contract.

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-Short Attention Span Theater-

Thank You Vietnam Veterans

2023-03-30

[Hot Air] Today marks the 50th anniversary of the day the last American soldier left Vietnam, following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords two months earlier. Fifty years. 58,220 Americans died in that war. More, actually. Those are the military casualties alone, according to the National Archives. Many others died as well in the cause of freedom. I was born in 1964 and watched footage from the war on the nightly news as I grew up. At the time, the footage was on film and actually developed in Japan and then flown to the United States, but much of it wound up on television. That made Vietnam the first "television war," where the carnage was often brought into Americans’ living rooms. As a kid, it was weird, because there wasn’t a time during my childhood when the war wasn’t part of the background of daily life. I was 11 when the war finally ended with the surrender of the Vietnamese government. I remember the helicopter evacuations well. By the time I understood what was going on the anti-war movement was in full swing. I remember Kent State, vaguely, and my parents gave me a book about it (a picture book, believe it or not) at some point. At the time I bought the propaganda that Nixon and the military were on the wrong side, although I never thought of our soldiers as the bad guys as so many did. But over the years I saw things very differently. The killing fields of Cambodia, which so many blamed on the U.S., proved to me that communism was evil. The Vietnamese refugees who had been betrayed not once but twice were a constant reminder of communism’s evil. Even as a teen, I began to understand that there are things more evil than war, and my experiences over the years proved that to be true. I developed an abiding hatred for communism, and a deep suspicion of the anti-military sentiment I saw all around me. I am not a militarist, but I believe in defending the West. In graduate school, I studied the war and came to the conclusion that Lyndon Johnson both started the real war for Americans (we had dipped our toe in years before, but weren’t deeply engaged until Johnson dove in) and lost it through grotesque mismanagement. Nixon promised to "Vietnamise" the war by handing over the ground fighting to Vietnamese troops and eventually succeeded in fulfilling that promise. It was an imperfect solution, but Johnson’s fecklessness had ensured victory would be impossible. Americans had turned against the war. At the time he was going for a Korean-type stalemate, and likely would have achieved that but for Watergate. The fall of Saigon and the fall of Nixon were largely contemporaneous. Ford tried to salvage the South by restarting the bombing of the North as we had promised should the fighting break out again, but Congress forbade it. Congress drove a stake through the South’s heart, but Johnson’s fecklessness lost the war years before. I bring up this history (or my version of it) in order to make a point: American soldiers were betrayed by their government. They were betrayed by Johnson and by Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense at the time. They sent soldiers—most of whom were draftees—into a war zone with no strategy to win the war, demanded they do so with bad tactics and bad leadership, and never properly defended the troops against their domestic critics. Teenagers risked their lives to come home to cries of "baby killer." They were vilified, abandoned by their leadership, and in the shame of losing the war were forgotten by the country. They never were properly honored. American citizens could and should have done better, but our leaders should have backed up the troops. They failed to do so. Photo is of COL Hal Moore commander of the Gary Owen Bde during the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, LZ X-Ray. 14 Nov 1965.

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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia

Questioning the Ukraine war does not make you a 'Putin apologist'

2022-03-17

[American Thinker] Writing in Commentary, neoconservative Joshua Muravchick labels those who believe that the roots of the current Russia-Ukraine War lie at least in part in the post—Cold War expansion of NATO as "Putin apologists." He groups into that category the Democratic Socialists of America (including several members of Congress); some writers at the far-left Nation magazine; members of the Quincy Institute, including its president, Andrew Bacevich and senior fellow Anatol Lieven; The American Conservative's Patrick Buchanan, Rod Dreher, and Scott McConnell; Frontpage Magazine contributor Robert Spencer; frequent Tablet contributor Lee Smith; conservative commentator Candace Owens; Fox News's Tucker Carlson; former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard; and, last but not least, former president Donald Trump. The "Putin apologists" on the left, Muravchik writes, are motivated by "an anti-war reflex" and a belief that "the American system, as an avatar of capitalism and systemic racism, is inherently malign." Some of the "Putin apologists" on the right, he explains, are "ideological isolationists" who "share the left's contempt for America." Others on what he calls the "Trumpist right" call themselves "patriots," but "their passions focus powerfully on disputes with other Americans" rather than our country's foreign adversaries. Muravchik doesn't appear to realize that the passionate focus of his article is his "disputes with other Americans." Muravchik calls the NATO expansion argument of the "Putin apologists" flimsy because Putin's view that NATO expansion threatens Russia's security is "nonsensical." "NATO," he writes, "does not threaten Russia and never has threatened it." NATO, he continues, is a defensive alliance, and adding Ukraine to NATO "would not change this a whit." It apparently doesn't matter to Muravchik that Putin's and Russia's perception of NATO differs from his own or even from the reality that NATO is a defensive alliance. Muravchik ignores what is one of the most important qualities of a statesman — what Halford Mackinder described as "an insight into the minds of other nations than his own." That insight was lacking, for example, during the Vietnam War, when the Johnson administration thought offering Ho Chi Minh massive government aid projects (like the Tennessee Valley Authority) would convince the communist leader to make peace and give up his quest to conquer South Vietnam. It was similarly lacking when that same administration (persuaded by defense secretary Robert McNamara, who knew next to nothing about communism or Russian history and culture) thought slowing or stopping the U.S. deployment of nuclear missiles would convince Soviet leaders to do likewise. More recently, the inability to gain insight into the minds of other nations on the part of the George W. Bush administration led to the delusional and costly policies of trying to spread democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan — policies, it is worth noting, championed by many neoconservatives. In his famous "Long Telegram" in 1946, George F. Kennan explained that Soviet/Russian foreign policy was motivated by "a neurotic view of world affairs" and an "instinctive Russian sense of insecurity." That traditional Russian insecurity, Kennan noted, grew "as Russia came into contact with [the] economically advanced west," which triggered "fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies." Russia's rulers, he wrote, "have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of western countries." That is why Russian leaders, according to Kennan, "have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between the western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within."

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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia

June 26, 1997: Dear Mr. President, We, the undersigned, believe that the current U.S.led effort to expand NATO, the focus of the recent Helsinki and Paris Summits, is a policy error of historic proportions.

2022-03-03

Wow, didn’t know Robert McNamara was a pro-Russia Putinbot. You learn something new every day. Should tell you something that a who’s who of deep state ghouls knew all this was bad, and still nothing changed. June 26, 1997 Dear Mr. President, We, the undersigned, believe that the current U.S.led effort to expand NATO, the focus of the recent Helsinki and Paris Summits, is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability for the following reasons: In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the START II and III treaties; In Europe, NATO expansion will draw a new line of division between the "ins" and the "outs," foster instability, and ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included; In NATO, expansion, which the Alliance has indicated is open-ended, will inevitably degrade NATO’s ability to carry out its primary mission and will involve U.S. security guarantees to countries with serious border and national minority problems, and unevenly developed systems of democratic government; In the U.S., NATO expansion will trigger an extended debate over its indeterminate, but certainly high, cost and will call into question the U.S. commitment to the Alliance, traditionally and rightly regarded as a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy. Because of these serious objections, and in the absence of any reason for rapid decision, we strongly urge that the NATO expansion process be suspended while alternative actions are pursued. These include: —opening the economic and political doors of the European Union to Central and Eastern Europe;—developing an enhanced Partnership for Peace program; —supporting a cooperative NATO-Russian relationship; and —continuing the arms reduction and transparency process, particularly with respect to nuclear weapons and materials, the major threat to U.S. security, and with respect to conventional military forces in Europe. Russia does not now pose a threat to its western neighbors and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are not in danger. For this reason, and the others cited above, we believe that NATO expansion is neither necessary nor desirable and that this ill-conceived policy can and should be put on hold. Sincerely,

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Afghanistan

Pakistani Duplicity Caused the United States to Lose in Afghanistan

2019-05-22

[The National Interest] The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C." H. R. McMaster wrote that statement in his 1997 scathing critique of the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. He was a major in the Army at that time. Now, he is a retired lieutenant general and former national security advisor to President Donald Trump. It is indeed ironic that McMaster eventually contributed to what many people thought to be impossible by repeating the mistakes of Vietnam and losing the Afghanistan war‐both in the field and in Washington, DC. The real tragedy is that America’s leaders, in particular its military leaders, long knew that the war in Afghanistan could not be won having chosen to fight it in a manner that was alien to its nature, thus wasting both treasure and precious lives. For over seventeen years we have wrongly applied counterinsurgency doctrine to a proxy war waged by Pakistan against the United States and Afghanistan. At the same time, we supplied Pakistan with generous aid packages to bribe them from pursuing a course of action opposed to our own, which they considered in their national interest. Counterinsurgency was never a winning strategy as long as Pakistan controlled the supply of our troops in landlocked Afghanistan and regulated the operational tempo through its proxy army, the Taliban, which has maintained an extensive recruiting, training and financial support infrastructure inside Pakistan, where it has been immune to attack. In essence, our leaders, through a combination of incompetence and indifference, allowed the United States to be defeated by Pakistan and paid them to do it. Pakistan’s objectives for Afghanistan have always been different than those of the United States. Not only has Pakistan not helped the United States in Afghanistan, but from the very beginning through its support of the Taliban, Pakistan has actively worked against our interests and is responsible for prolongation of the war and the deaths and maiming of thousands of Americans and Afghans.

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Home Front: WoT

"Cold Blood": LBJ's Conduct of Limited War in Vietnam

2013-03-25

These are excepts from a lecture held by Professor of History and author George C. Herring, at the U.S. Air Force Academy twenty-three years ago, about a war that ended nearly forty years ago. It's a tad long, but well worth the read if you have the time. Limited war requires the most sophisticated strategy, precisely formulated in terms of ends and means, with particular attention to keeping costs at acceptable levels. What stands out about the Johnson administration's handling of Vietnam is that in what may have been the most complex war ever fought by the United States there was never any systematic discussion at the highest levels of government of the fundamental issue of how the war should be fought. In many ways a great president, Johnson was badly miscast as a war leader. He preoccupied himself with other matters, the Great Society and the legislative process he understood best and so loved. In contrast to Lincoln, Roosevelt, and even Harry Truman, he had little interest in military affairs and no illusions of military expertise. Stephen Peter Rosen has observed "He did not 'define a clear military mission for the military' and did not 'establish a clear limit to the resources to be allocated for that mission.'" Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara might have filled the strategic void left by the president, but he was no more willing to intrude in this area than Johnson. In many ways a superb Secretary of Defense, he was an ineffectual minister of war. Conceding his ignorance of military matters, he refused to interfere with the formulation of strategy, leaving it to the military to set the strategic agenda. Inasmuch as McNamara and Johnson's civilian advisers thought strategically, they did so in terms of the limited war theories in vogue at the time. Strategy was primarily a matter of sending signals to foes, of communicating resolve, of using military force in a carefully calibrated way to deter enemies or bargain toward a negotiated settlement. This approach must have appeared expedient to Johnson and his advisers because it seemed to offer a cheap, low-risk answer to a difficult problem. It also appeared to be controllable, thereby reducing the risk of all-out war. The Kennedy administration's successful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis seems to have reinforced in the minds of U.S. officials the value of such an approach. "There is no longer any such thing as strategy, only crisis management," McNamara exclaimed in the aftermath of Kennedy's victory. He could not have been more wrong, of course, and the reliance on limited war theory had unfortunate consequences. Lyndon Johnson's entirely political manner of running the war, his consensus-oriented modus operandi, effectively stifled debate. On such issues as bombing targets and bombing pauses, troops levels and troop use, by making concessions to each side without giving any what it wanted, he managed to keep dissent and controversy under control. "He managed to keep dissent and controversy under control." One has to ask, is that irony, or ironic irony, or the irony of ironic irony? Or the ironic irony of ironic irony? ??? For some reason I don't think control of controversy is the pinnacle of presidential achievement. There is plenty of controversy to go around and maintaining a monopoly at the presidential level is not something worthy of admiration. But that's just me. The president and his top advisers also imposed rigid standards of loyalty on a bitterly divided administration. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson had no tolerance for controversy, and he imposed on his advisers the "Macy's window at high noon" brand of loyalty made legendary by David Halberstam. Unfortunately, the two men who might have influenced him, McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, shared his perverted notions of team play. Finally, and perhaps even more important, is what might be called the MacArthur syndrome, the pervasive fear among civilians and military of a repetition of the illustrious general's challenge to civilian authority. Johnson, as noted, lived in terror of a military revolt and did everything in his power to avert it. Themselves learning from Korea, the Joint Chiefs carefully refrained from anything even smacking of a direct challenge to civilian authority. Although they remained deeply divided on the conduct of the war, they continued to present unified proposals to the civilians, thus stifling debate within their own ranks. To the end, Johnson continued to deny that significant differences had existed within his administration, and no one could have written a better epitaph for a hopelessly flawed command system than its architect, the man who had imposed his own peculiar brand of unity on a bitterly divided government. "There have been no divisions in this government," he proudly proclaimed in November 1967. "We may have been wrong, but we have not been divided." It was a strange observation, reflecting a curiously distorted sense of priorities. And of course it was not true. The administration was both wrong and divided, and the fact that the divisions could not be worked out or even addressed may have contributed to the wrongness of the policies, at huge costs to the men themselves - and especially to the nation.

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Home Front: Politix

Huckabee Passes Buck On Responsibility In Police Killings

2009-12-02

Curious to a politician who wears faith on his sleeve, ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has engaged in Pilate-like hand washing over commuting the prison sentence of cop killer Maurice Clemmons. We've received a Huckabee statement blaming "a series of errors in the criminal justice system," and heard a Fox News interview in which the would-be president denounced "Washington judges" and talked about police making errors in paperwork. "It's not your fault governor . . . I'm not saying it's your fault. I don't think anybody watching thinks it's your fault," cooed interviewer/enabler Bill O'Reilly. So hard it is to face the truth. Maurice Clemmons would still be in an Arkansas prison cell, and four Lakewood police officers would be alive, but for Huckabee's actions. Convicted rapist Wayne DuMond would not have raped and killed a woman had he not been paroled 11 months before the crime. Of course, Huckabee blamed the governor who preceded him, and the state parole board that he appointed. The episode raises discomforting questions about public life in America. Does anybody ever accept responsibility on the spot? Almost never! The pattern is to wait for years until there's a book to sell, such as ex-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's memoir-driven confession that "we were terribly, terribly wrong" about Vietnam. Are senior officials held to account? The foreign secretary in Britain's cabinet, Lord Carrington, resigned immediately after Argentina occupied the Falkland Islands. He gave a direct, honest explanation: It happened on my watch, so I am responsible. Over here, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld botched the Iraq War and occupation, yet hung on until he was fired after the 2006 election. Vice President Dick Cheney stayed on the Republicans' 2004 ticket despite his lies about weapons of mass destruction, and prediction that Iraqis would greet us as "liberators." Nor, except in very rare cases, does anybody resign on principle. Did any senior Clinton aide quit in protest at the president's private (and public) lies about his relationship with "that woman" Monica Lewinsky? The most we can expect is, in a phrase made famous during Watergate, "the modified limited hangout route." Huckabee is traveling down this road, saying of the Clemmons commutation: "It's not something I'm happy about at this particular moment." One more point, illustrated by O'Reilly's worshipful treatment of Huckabee and lying about the terms of Clemmons' bail: Ideology-driven media organizations, such as Fox, will airbrush rather than pursue malfeasance when it happens on their side of the fence. It wasn't always so. As President Richard Nixon fell to the self-inflicted wounds of Watergate, such Republicans as Sens. Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott — and Washington Attorney General Slade Gorton — behaved with honor and helped propel his exit from office. Conservative New York Times columnist William Safire was relentless in probing the tacky side of the Clinton presidency. He was, however, equally unsparing in exposing Bush I blunders that persuaded Iraq's Saddam Hussein that he had a free hand to invade Kuwait. Nowadays, we have blatant double standards. Not long ago, a debunking discussion on Sean Hannity's Fox show centered on the fact that Al Gore travels by private jet. Viewers of the "fair and balanced" network likely will never learn that Sarah Palin's "bus tour" to promote her book has included flights on a $4,000-per-hour Gulfstream 2 private jet. It's how the "hockey mom" arrived in the Tri-Cities for Thanksgiving. Huckabee issued more than 1,000 commutations and pardons during 10 years as governor of Arkansas. Within six months of Huckabee's commutation, Clemmons violated conditions of parole, and was sent back to prison in 2001 for aggravated robbery. He was paroled again by the state of Arkansas in 2004. 'Can't blame that on "Washington judges." A county prosecutor in Arkansas, Robert Herzfeld, wrote Huckabee arguing that his clemency policy was "fatally flawed" — and would later sue to overturn a Huckabee decision to set free a murderer who bludgeoned his victim. The reply to his letter came from Huckabee's chief of staff: "The governor read your letter and laughed out loud. He wanted me to respond to you. I wish you success as you cut down on your caffeine consumption." Instead of buck passing on Fox News, Mike Huckabee and Bill O'Reilly should donate their book royalty bucks to help the nine children who lost parents when Maurice Clemmons opened fire on Sunday morning.

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Afghanistan

McNamara's Ghosts in Afghanistan - Cornels of truth from the Looney Left?

2009-07-08

Good lord above, it's Tom Hayden. Next time please tell us in advance. I was wondering who wrote this nonsense and I actually had to go to Huffpo [shudder] to find out. Hayden. Criminy. He's still around? Robert McNamara died the other day as seven American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. It wasn't the deaths on the same day that made me remember McNamara's folly. It was the sense that McNamara's ghost is hovering over the new graveyard of America's future.

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-Short Attention Span Theater-

Philadelphia Wants To Prohibit Unauthorized Talking

2008-07-07

May the city of Philadelphia subject tour guides to hundreds of dollars in fines for engaging in unauthorized talking? This is the question the Institute for Justice (IJ) seeks to answer in a federal lawsuit filed today, two days before Philadelphia celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The suit is brought on behalf of three Philadelphia tour guides—Mike Tait, Josh Silver and Ann Boulais—seeking to overturn a law enacted in April that will make it illegal for anyone like them to give a tour of much of the city’s downtown area without first passing a test and obtaining a government license—without, in essence, getting the government’s permission to speak. Effective in October, unlicensed tour guides can face fines of up to $300 per violation and have their businesses shut down. “The government cannot be in the business of deciding who may speak and who may not,” said Robert McNamara, a staff attorney with the Institute for Justice, a national public interest law firm with a history of defending free speech and the rights of entrepreneurs. “The Constitution protects your right to communicate for a living, whether you are a journalist, a musician or a tour guide. It makes no more sense to let city officials decide who is allowed to talk about history than it would to let them decide who is allowed to talk about sports.” The new law makes it illegal to give a tour for compensation of the city’s main tourist area without first submitting a written application, paying a fee, providing proof of insurance and passing a written examination in order to be granted a license to tour. The program will be administered and the test developed by an administrative agency to be named by the mayor’s office. No test has been made public. The law is targeted at speech and applies only to someone who guides or directs people within the city or offers to do so while “provid[ing] information on the City’s geography, history, historic sites, historic structures, historic objects or other places of interest.” The program also discriminates against small or independent tour operators. The law gives the administrative agency complete discretion to exempt large operators—who would be better able to cope with the costs of regulation—from the testing requirements, provided the companies have training programs that are “equivalent.” The irony of forbidding people to talk about Philadelphia’s history—including the history of the Framers’ enshrining fundamental American liberties in the Constitution—is not lost on Mike Tait, Josh Silver and Ann Boulais, three Philadelphians who make their living by telling visitors and natives about the history, culture and architecture of the place they love. Mike, Josh and Ann are serious about their city’s history—they share a deep commitment to accuracy as well as entertainment in their tours—and they are also serious about the liberties protected by the Constitution, which is why they joined together with the Institute for Justice to strike down the Philadelphia tour guide licensing scheme as a violation of their freedom of speech and right to earn an honest living. “It is the right of every American to challenge laws that are unfair and wrong,” said Mike Tait. “As a matter of fact, that was fundamentally what the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia—and the birth of our nation—was all about.”

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Science & Technology

US 'planned to test nerve gas on diggers'

2008-07-05

Top secret US military plans to test deadly nerve gas by dropping it on soldiers in a remote Queensland rainforest during the Cold War have been uncovered in Australian Government archives. Newly declassified Australian Defence Department and Prime Minister’s office files show that the United States was strongly pushing the Government for tests on Australian soil of two of the most deadly chemical weapons ever developed, VX and GB — better known as Sarin — nerve gas. The plan, which is disclosed for the first time on tomorrow’s SUNDAY program on Nine, called for 200 mainly Australian combat troops to be aerially bombed and sprayed with the chemical weapons — with all but a handful of the soldiers to be kept in the dark about the "full details" of the tests. A former senior official with then Prime Minister Harold Holt, Mr Peter Bailey, tells the program that as far as he knows the tests never went ahead but the planning was very advanced. He admitted the whole operation was to be kept secret because use of such weapons was almost certainly illegal under international law at the time. "The idea that we could actually that the Australians could countenance such an activity is unacceptable," University of NSW toxicologist Professor Chris Winder said. He says even a fraction of a drop of either chemical on exposed skin could have been fatal and Cold War fears that communist Chinese or Russian attackers might have used such weapons in a third world war "doesn’t justify it now and I don’t think it justified it then". The files show that in July 1962 the then-US defence secretary Robert McNamara wrote in secret to the Australian Defence Department suggesting joint testing of chemical weapons "on a classified basis without a public release by either country". In early 1963 a survey team of Australian and US scientists reviewed sites in Australia for chemical warfare tests, suggesting the remote Iron Range rainforest near Lockhart River in far north Queensland as one such location. The request caused consternation in Canberra, with senior Defence bureaucrats clearly opposed to the use of nerve gas, but, as former senior Prime Ministerial policy advisor Peter Bailey recalls: "I heard that many times in Cabinet meetings that if they weren’t pretty good and pretty faithful to the Americans we would be dumped. "We had already been dumped with the British east of Suez pullout so ministers were pretty aware this was our one main support and the red peril thing was still in people’s minds." In October 1964 the Americans pushed the request again, this time insisting that the public should be fed a "cover story" to conceal the real nature of the tests: the documents show the public was to be told the tests were to test equipment or land reclamation in a jungle environment. Low-flying military aircraft and spraying was to be explained away with the false claim that low-risk herbicides and insecticides were to be used in the testing but the cover stories were clearly untrue — he real chemicals to be used were two of the most deadly man-made substances, VX and GB nerve gas. Former Democrat Senator Lyn Allison, who became aware of the existence of references to secret chemical weapons tests in Australia during her support of sick former veterans of the Maralinga nuclear bomb tests, told SUNDAY that her own attempts to get the full story on what went on with proposed testing were rebuffed several years ago. She said Government files on the issue were still classified even now and the revelations in the new documents obtained by SUNDAY underlined the need for the Defence Department to finally disclose all that went on during the Cold War. "To understand that Australia was still prepared to consider this proposal because of its relationship with the US I think needs proper examination," Senator Allison told the program. "So all those documents should be released, there shouldn’t be any pussy footing around — t’s time for us to know what went on."

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Fifth Column

Law School to Sponsor Bush War Crimes Trial

2008-06-21

A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. "This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth." "We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice," Velvel said. "And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s." Velvel said past practice has been to allow U.S. officials responsible for war crimes in Viet Nam and elsewhere to enjoy immunity from prosecution upon leaving office. "President Johnson retired to his Texas ranch and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was named to head the World Bank; Richard Nixon retired to San Clemente and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was allowed to grow richer and richer," Velvel said. He noted in the years since the prosecution and punishment of German and Japanese leaders after World War Two those nation's leaders changed their countries' aggressor cultures. One cannot discount contributory cause and effect here, he said. "For Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Yoo to spend years in jail or go to the gallows for their crimes would be a powerful lesson to future American leaders," Velvel said. Verdict first, trial afterwards ... The conference will take up such issues as the nature of domestic and international crimes committed; which high-level Bush officials, including Federal judges and Members of Congress, are chargeable with war crimes; which foreign and domestic tribunals can be used to prosecute them; and the setting up of an umbrella coordinating committee with representatives of legal groups concerned about the war crimes such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, ACLU, among others. You get the sense that there is something and someone underneath all this driving it forward, just as with the Obama campaign and other liberal/socialist agendas ... The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover was established in 1988 to provide an affordable, quality legal education to minorities, immigrants and students from low-income households that might otherwise be denied the opportunity to obtain a legal education and practice law. Its founder, Dean Velvel, has been honored by the National Law Journal and cited in various publications for his contributions to the reform of legal education. Mr. Velvel is jonesing for the opportunity to be the man who brought down the e-e-e-e-vil Bush administration ...

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Home Front: Culture Wars

New Movie About Abu Ghraib Is Ponderous, Pretentious

2008-04-27

Excerpts from a review, written by Elbert Ventura and published in The New Republic magazine, of the new documentary movie Standard Operating Procedure, about the Abu Ghraib scandal. ... Forget the consensus: The Fog of War [a movie, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2003, about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War] and Standard Operating Procedure (which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) are [Director Errol] Morris's two worst movies. Ponderous where they should be penetrating, ambiguous where they should be clear, Morris's Iraq-era docs highlight the weaknesses of his aesthetic and give us the worst of two worlds: pretentious cinema and bad journalism. .... One problem is Morris's interview style. "I try to ask no questions at all. The idea is to say as little as possible and let the person who I'm talking to do all of the talking," he once explained. Privileging subjective experience over objective reporting, he allows his interviewees to bloviate with little interruption or follow up. The tactic allows his subjects to gallop around in their heads -- and perhaps even trip themselves up with their own words. .... An incoherent mishmash of intimate profile, investigative reporting, and philosophical inquiry ... Morris's movie that tells us little that is new. SOP is structured around Morris's interviews with five of the seven "bad apples" who were indicted for their roles in the detainee abuse scandal. The movie argues that the guards caught in those photos were thrown under the bus by their superiors and the administration, an uncontroversial stance that Morris treats as breaking news. SOP achieves the admirable goal of humanizing the soldiers, of fleshing out the two-dimensional villains we saw in those photos. But if it's important to hear the guards' side of the story, it is also essential to approach it with a measure of skepticism. Morris seems to take everything they say at face value. His unblinking stare and unobtrusive interrogation provide his subjects a hospitable forum to make their case. Blame is apportioned to others: the higher-ups, fellow guards, other governmental agencies at Abu Ghraib. Mitigating factors are raised: the numbing routine of prison duty, the daily threats from outside and in. The overall effect is to make us sympathize with the guards, even as the movie does little to press them on their own accountability and reluctant remorse. It's telling that the soldiers who come off looking the worst, Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick, are the ones who don't get time on camera -- underscoring just how thoroughly the interviewees (some of whom dish on Graner and Frederick) have commandeered the movie's point of view. In the course of defending the guards as scapegoats for a corrupt policy, Morris ends up going easy on their own culpability. .... Too much of SOP is given over to ruminations about the nature of photography, the instability of images, and the elusiveness of truth -- none of which yield anything remotely revelatory. Enamored with epistemological ambiguities, Morris spends far too much time pondering pseudo-profound questions at the expense of finding concrete answers. .... Morris stuffs SOP with stylized reenactments, dramatizing events .... In one scene, a soldier recalls a drop of blood from a detainee landing on his shirt -- cue exquisitely lit shot of a perfect crimson orb plinking onto a uniform. In another scene that borders on self-parody, Morris illustrates an anecdote about Saddam Hussein making himself a fried egg with slow-mo shots of an egg being cracked open, dropped into a pan, and cooked in oil. .... Morris retains the qualities that distinguished his past movies: an ear for the loopy digression, an eye for the surreal in plain sight, a speculative turn of mind. But those same gifts begin to seem like flaws when the subject moves from freaks and geeks to war and torture. Prizing meditation over muckraking, Morris has made a movie that indulges his love for opacity and abstraction -- and fails our need to know. ....

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