Trump's Muslim Ban is a Disgrace

BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD Sacramento Bee

If any American value was served by President Donald Trump’s inhumane treatment of hundreds of ordinary people from Muslim-majority nations this weekend, we would like to know what it is.

How sickening it was to watch Trump’s draconian executive order on refugees play out, indefinitely banning entry to Syrian refugees and suspending U.S. travel for visa and, for a time, even green card holders from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

The estimated 375 travelers detained or prevented from boarding flights into the U.S. on Saturday were not terrorist threats. They were scientists, medical students, engineers, interpreters who had risked their lives to help the U.S. government.

A Sudanese graduate student at Stanford University was handcuffed and detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Two Iranian-born Chicago suburbanites with green cards were held at O’Hare International Airport with their 18-month-old baby. A 70-year-old father joining his son was put on a plane back to Iran at Los Angeles International Airport.

NATIONAL VIGILANCE IS UNDENIABLY IMPORTANT, BUT TRUMP’S ORDER WAS WRONG ON ALMOST EVERY LEVEL, TO THE POINT OF INCOMPETENCE.

The March and the War: Tom Englehart

The Bureaucracy, the March, and the War

American Disengagement
By Tom Engelhardt
As I was heading out into a dark, drippingly wet, appropriately dispiriting New York City day, on my way to the "Fall Out Against the War" march -- one of 11 regional antiwar demonstrations held this Saturday -- I was thinking: then and now, Vietnam and Iraq. Since the Bush administration had Vietnam on the brain while planning to take down Saddam Hussein's regime for the home team, it's hardly surprising that, from the moment its invasion was launched in March 2003, the Vietnam analogy has been on the American brain -- and, even domestically, there's something to be said for it.

As John Mueller, an expert on public opinion and American wars, pointed out back in November 2005, Americans turned against the Iraq War in a pattern recognizable from the Vietnam era (as well as the Korean one) -- initial, broad post-invasion support that eroded irreversibly as American casualties rose. "The only thing remarkable about the current war in Iraq," Mueller wrote, "is how precipitously American public support has dropped off. Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War." He added, quite correctly, as it turned out: "And if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline."

Where the Vietnam analogy distinctly breaks down, however, is in the streets. In the Vietnam era, the demonstrations started small and built slowly over the years toward the massive -- in Washington, in cities around the country, and then on campuses nationwide. In those years, as anger, anxiety, and outrage mounted, militancy rose, and yet the range of antiwar demonstrators grew to include groups as diverse as "businessmen against the war" and large numbers of ever more vociferous Vietnam vets, often just back from the war itself. Almost exactly the opposite pattern -- the vets aside -- has occurred with Iraq. The prewar demonstrations were monstrous, instantaneously gigantic, at home and abroad. Millions of people grasped just where we were going in late 2002 and early 2003, and grasped as well that the Bush dream of an American-occupied Iraq would lead to disaster and death galore. The New York Times, usually notoriously unimpressed with demonstrations, referred to the massed demonstrators then as the second "superpower" on a previously one superpower planet. And it did look, as the Times headline went, as if there were "a new power in the streets."

But here was the strange thing, as the "lone superpower" faltered, as the Bush administration and the Pentagon came to look ever less super, ever less victorious, ever less powerful, so did that other superpower. Discouragement of a special sort seemed to set in -- initially perhaps that the invasion had not been stopped and that, in Washington, no one in a tone-deaf administration even seemed to be listening. Still, through the first years of the war, on occasion, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators could be gathered in one spot to march massively, even cheerfully; these were crowds filled with "first timers" (who were proud to tell you so); and, increasingly, with the families of soldiers stationed in Iraq (or Afghanistan), or of soldiers who had died there, and even, sometimes, with some of the soldiers themselves, as well as contingents of vets from the Vietnam era, now older, greyer, but still vociferously antiwar.

However, over the years, unlike in the Vietnam era, the demonstrations shrank, and somehow the anxiety, the anger -- though it remained suspended somewhere in the American ether -- stopped manifesting itself so publicly, even as the war went on and on. Or put another way, perhaps the anger went deeper and turned inward, like a scouring agent. Perhaps it went all the way into what was left of an American belief system, into despair about the unresponsiveness of the government -- with paralyzing effect. As another potentially more disastrous war with Iran edges into sight, the response has been limited largely to what might be called the professional demonstrators. The surge of hope, of visual creativity, of spontaneous interaction, of the urge to turn out, that arose in those prewar demonstrations now seemed so long gone, replaced by a far more powerful sense that nothing anyone could do mattered in the least.

When it comes to the Vietnam analogy domestically, the question that still hangs in the air is whether, as in the latter years of the Vietnam era, the soldiers, in Iraq (and Afghanistan) as well as here at home, will take matters into their own hands; whether, as with Vietnam, in the end Iraq (and Iran) will be left to the vets of this war and their families and friends -- or to no one at all.

The Consensus Gap

Here's the strange thing: As we all know, the Washington Consensus -- Democrats as well as Republicans, in Congress as in the Oval Office -– has been settling ever deeper into the Iraqi imperial project. As a town, official Washington, it seems, has come to terms with a post-surge occupation strategy that will give new meaning to what, in the days after the 2003 invasion, quickly came to be known as the Q-word (for the Vietnam-era "quagmire"). The President has made it all too clear that he will fight his war in Iraq to the last second of his administration -- and, if he has anything to say about it (as indeed he might), well beyond. In their "classified campaign strategy for the country," our ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and the President's surge commander, Gen. David Petraeus, are reportedly already planning their war-fighting and occupation policy through the summer of 2009, and so into the next presidency. The three leading Democratic candidates for president, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, have refused to guarantee that American troops will even be totally out of Iraq by 2013, the end of a first term in office -- as essentially has every Republican candidate except Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas. In fact, in Washington, the ongoing war is now such a given that it's hardly being discussed at the moment (as the one in Afghanistan has never been). The focus has instead shifted to the next possible administration monstrosity -- a possible air assault on Iran that would essentially guarantee a global recession or depression.

Meanwhile, the American people -- having formed their own Iraq Study Group as early as 2005 -- have moved in another direction entirely. On this, the opinion polls have been, and remain (as Mueller suggested they would), unanimous. When Americans are asked how the President is handling the war in Iraq, disapproval figures run 67% to 26% in the most recent CBS News poll; 68% to 30% in the ABC News/Washington Post poll; and, according to CNN's pollsters, opposition to the war itself runs at a 65% to 34% clip. As for "staying" some course in Iraq to 2013 or beyond, that CBS News poll, typically, has 45% of Americans wanting all troops out in "less than a year" and 72% in "one to two years" -- in other words, not by the end of, but the beginning of, the next presidential term in office. (The ABC News/Washington Post poll indicates, among other things, that, by 55% to 40%, Americans feel the Democrats in Congress have not gone "far enough in opposing the war in Iraq"; and that they want Congress to rein in the administration's soaring, off-the-books war financing requests.)

In other words, the Washington elite are settling ever deeper, ever less responsively, into the Big Muddy, while the American Consensus has come down quite decisively elsewhere. For all intents and purposes, it seems that most Americans are acting as if some policy page had already been turned, as if Iraq was so been-there, done-that. Perhaps many are also assuming that the present administration is beyond unreachable and that any successor will be certain to fix the problem; or, alternately, that nothing the public can do in relation to the Washington Consensus, including voting, matters one whit; or some helpless, hopeless combination of the two and who knows what else.

As I sat in that rumbling subway car on my way to the march in lower Manhattan, I kept wondering who, between the Iraq-forever-and-a-day crowd and the been-there/done-that folks might think it worth the bother to turn out at an antiwar rally on such a lousy day. And it was then that a brief encounter from the summer came to mind.

I'm now 63 years old and increasingly feel as if my 1950s childhood came out of another universe. Sometime in August, I ran into a "kid" -- maybe in his early thirties -- employed by a consulting firm to do what once would have been the work of a federal government employee. He gamely tried to explain the sinews of his privatized world to me. As he spoke, I began to wonder whether he was interested in working in the federal government, not just as a consultant to it. To ask the question, I began explaining how I had grown up dreaming about being part of the government -- the State Department, actually. It seemed to me then like an honorable, if not downright glorious, destiny to represent your country to others. It was a feeling that left me deep into the 1960s when I had, in fact, already been accepted into the United States Information Agency (from which I would have, a good deal less gloriously, propagandized for my country). It was only then that anger over the Vietnam War swept me elsewhere.

I told the young consultant that, when young, I had dreamed of doing my "civic duty" and his eyes promptly widened in visible disbelief. He rolled that phrase around for a moment, then said (all dialogue recreated from my faulty memory): "Civic duty? No one in my world thinks about it that way any more." He paused and added, hesitantly, "But I might actually like to be in the bureaucracy for a while."

That was my moment to widen my eyes. What I once thought of as "the government" had, in the space of mere decades, become "the bureaucracy," even to someone who would consider joining it -- and, the worst of it was, I knew he was right. This was one genuine accomplishment of a quarter-century-plus of the Republican "revolution" (and the Clinton interregnum). All those presidential candidates, running as small-government outsiders ready to bring Washington big spenders to heel, had, on coming to power, only fed that government mercilessly, throwing untold numbers of tax dollars at the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, ensuring that they would become ever more bloated, powerful, and labyrinthine, ever more focused on their own well-being, and ever less civic; ensuring that the government as a whole would be ever more "bureaucratic," ever less "ept," and -- always -- ever more oppressive, with ever more police-state-like powers.

All that had been strangled in the process -- made smaller, if you will -- was the federal government's ability to deliver actual services to the population that paid for it. All that was made smaller in the world beyond Washington was whatever residual faith existed that this was "your" government, that it actually represented you in any way. As the state's bureaucratic, military, and policing powers bloated, so, too, did the electoral process -- and lost as well was the belief that your vote could determine anything much at all.

Looking back, this was, in a sense, what 9/11 really meant in America. The one thing that a government, which had long reinforced its own powers, should have been able to deliver was intelligence and protection. So it wasn't, I suspect, just those towers that crumbled on that day. What also crumbled was a residual faith in "we, the people." This was actually what the Bush administration played on when it urged Americans not to mobilize for its Global War on Terror, but simply to go about their business, to -- as the President famously put it 16 days after 9/11 -- "get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." In a sense, Bush and his top officials were just doing what came naturally -- further sidelining the American people so they could fight their private wars in peace (so to speak).

The "bureaucracy" had strangled the very idea of the "civic." Who would even think about entering such a world today as a "civic duty," rather than as a career move; or imagine Washington as "our" government; or that anyone inside the famed Beltway, or near the K-Street hive of lobbyists, or in Congress or the Oval Office would give a damn about you? This is why, at a deeper level, the Washington Consensus today has next to nothing to do with the American one.

American Disengagement

When people look back on the Vietnam era, few comment on how connected the size and vigor of demonstrations were to a conception of government in Washington as responsible to the American people. Even the youthful radicals of the time, in their outrage, still generally believed that Washington was not living up to some ideal they had absorbed in their younger years. Whatever they were denouncing, the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in their Port Huron Statement, for instance, spoke without irony or discomfort of "[f]reedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men."

Though they may not have known it, they were still believers, after a fashion. By and large, the demonstrators of that moment not only believed that Washington should listen, but when, for instance, they chanted angrily, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?", that President Lyndon Baines Johnson would be listening. (And, in fact, he was. He called it "that horrible song.") Which young people today would believe that in their gut? Who would believe such a thing of "the bureaucracy"?

Don't forget, demonstrating is another kind of civic duty -- but perhaps a waning one. I was struck this weekend that, even among people I know, many of whom had demonstrated in the Vietnam era and had turned out again in the early years of this war, next to none were on the streets this Saturday. Most were simply going about their business with other, better things to do.

The fact is: Attending a march like Saturday's is still, for me, something like an ingrained civic habit, like.... gulp.... voting, which I can't imagine not doing -- even when it has little meaning to me -- or keeping informed by reading a newspaper daily in print (something that, it seems, just about no one under 25 does any more). These are the habits of a lifetime and they don't disappear quickly. But when they're gone, or if they don't make it to the next generation intact, it's hard, if not impossible, to get them back.

If you need another point of comparison, consider TV comic Stephen Colbert's joke (or is it?) race for the presidency in his home state of South Carolina (or the fact that, in a Rasmussen Report telephone poll, he garnered 13% support in the Republican field just days after announcing his run). Again, I'm old enough to remember the last time something like this happened. Sometime in the late 1950s -- the details escape me -- a few fans of the cartoon strip Pogo decided to launch a "Pogo for President" campaign in election season. (Mind you, that strip, about a talking opossum and his pals in Okefenokee Swamp, was a classic with a critical, political edge. Who could forget the moment when Howland Owl and the turtle, Churchy LaFemme, decided to enter the nuclear age by creating uranium from a combination of a Yew tree and a geranium.) In the strip, Pogo did indeed run for president and its creator, Walt Kelly, used that hook to promote perfectly real voter-registration campaigns. But -- as I remember it -- he was horrified by the real-life campaign for his character and insisted that it be stopped. You didn't, after all, make a mockery of American democracy that way. It just wasn't funny.

No longer. Now, the "character" is launched onto the field of electoral play by the creator himself, who also happens to be promoting a book in need of publicity; and Colbert's ploy is hailed as a kind of transcendent reality, not simply a mockery of it, even on that most mainstream of Sunday yak shows, Tim Russert's Meet the Press. Of course, the joke -- and it's a grim one indeed -- is on what's left of American democracy, which, as Colbert obviously means to prove, is the real mockery of our moment.

Perhaps we all have to hope that, when he's done with the election, he'll turn his attention to demonstrations in a world increasingly uncongenial to "civic duty" of any sort. It seems that we've entered a time in which even demonstrating can be outsourced, privatized, left to the pros, or simply dismissed (like so much else) as hopeless, a waste of time. So I was heading toward this demonstration, wondering not why more people wouldn't be there, but why anyone would be.

Penned in on the Streets

And here's how it felt:


"From the moment I looked across the aisle in the subway and saw the woman with the upside-down, hand-painted sign -- an anguished face, blood, and 'no war' on it -- and she noted my sign, also resting against my knees but modestly turned away from view, and gave me the thumbs up sign, I knew things would be okay. As my wife, a friend, and I exited the subway at the 50th Street station on the west side of New York, I noted three college-age women bent over a subway bench magic-marking in messages on their blank sign boards, a signal that we were heading for some special do-it-yourself event."
Oops! Sorry, that was my description of the first moments of a massive antiwar march -- half a million or more people took part -- in New York City on February 15, 2003, just over a month before the invasion of Iraq was launched.

On my subway car Saturday, there were no obvious demonstrators carrying signs; no eager faces or hands ready to give a thumbs-up sign; no one who even looked like he or she was heading for a demonstration. (Of course, I had no handmade sign and didn't look that way either.)

A signature aspect of this era's antiwar demonstrations, from the first prewar giants on, has been the spontaneous, personal signage, often a literal sea of waving individual expressions of indignation, sardonic humor, hope, despair, absurdity, you name it.

On Saturday, most of the signs were printed and clearly organizationally inspired; not all, however, as the shots by Tam Turse, the young photojournalist who accompanied me, eloquently indicate.

As for the police, well, here's how it felt with them:


"They still had us more or less confined to the sidewalk and a bit of the street on one side of the avenue, and cars were still crawling by. But already demonstrators were moving the orange police cones quickly set up for this unexpected crowd on an unexpectedly occupied avenue ever farther out into the traffic. Soon, to relieve pressure, the police opened a side street and with a great cheer our section of the rolling non-march burst through up to Second [Avenue] where we found ourselves in an even greater mass of humanity, heading north on our own avenue without a single car, truck, or bus."
Uh-oh, my mistake again! That, too, was the February 15, 2003 demo. This time, I came out of the subway at 23rd Street and was promptly accosted by a confused young German woman, postcards clutched in one hand. She pointed at two blue mailboxes on the corner and asked, in charmingly accented English, how you put the cards in. "Oh," I said, "let me show you." And I promptly pulled on each mailbox handle, only to find them locked. The police had undoubtedly done this as an anti-terror measure. The woman was relieved, she told me, that she wasn't "mad." No, I assured her, it was the world that was mad, not her.

The rest of the march was, in essence, a police event, the demonstrators penned in by moveable metal barricades, "guarded" often by more police personnel than on-lookers. From the moment we began to march in the rain, the police presence was overwhelming, starting with a well-marked NYPD "Sky Watch" tower, a mobile tower that can be raised anywhere in which police observers can spy on you from behind a Darth Vader-style darkened window. In fact, we marchers were penned in by the police as we headed south for Foley Square, cut off, for instance, from the large cross street at 14th by a row of dismounted police using their motorcycles as a barricade. Police vehicles and police on foot moved slowly in front of the demonstration as well as behind it. Police even marched in the demonstration (though not as demonstrators). Essentially, it was, as all rallies and demonstrations now seem to be in our growing Homeland Security state-let, a police march.

Led by a sizeable contingent of soldiers, vets, and military families, there were perhaps 10,000 marchers -- a rare occasion when my own rough estimate fit the normal police undercount -- on a dreary, rainy day, which is no small thing. Each of them left his or her life for a few hours to take a walk (or, in the case of one elderly lady, to be wheeled, encased in plastic, or for two "grannies for peace" to be peddled in a volunteer pedicab) in mild discomfort, to chant, to call out, even in a few creative cases, to display feelings on individual placards or constructions or in group tableaux. Each of them, for his or her own reason, was civic, even global. Add up all the people who did this in 11 cities nationwide, and the numbers aren't unimpressive. But with unending war, as well as perpetual death and destruction on the Bush administration menu, with the horizon darkened by the possibility of a strike against Iran, and a population which has turned its back on most of the above, it was, nonetheless, clearly underwhelming.

Meanwhile, in Iraq on Saturday, according to news reports, it was just an ordinary day, the usual harvest of decomposing corpses, deadly roadside blasts, assassinations, kidnappings, U.S. raids, and, bizarrely, the breakfast poisoning of 100 Iraqi soldiers. One American death was announced on Saturday. We don't yet know who the soldier was, only that he died "when he sustained small arms fire while conducting operations in Salah ad Din [Province]." He could, of course, have come from New York City, but the odds are that he came from a small town somewhere in the American hinterlands, from perhaps Latta, South Carolina or Lone Pine, California.

He might, or might not, have ever visited Disney World. He might have joined the overstretched U.S. armed forces for the increasingly massive bonuses the military is now offering to bind the poor and futureless close in a war that has been rejected by the American people; or perhaps he simply signed on with some of that residual sense of civic duty that's fast fleeing the land; or, possibly, both of the above. Perhaps, if he hadn't died, he would, like 12 former captains who recently wrote "The Real Iraq We Knew" for the Washington Post op-ed page and called our "best option… to leave Iraq immediately," have returned to speak out against the war. Who knows. Already, for 3,839 Americans in Iraq and 451 Americans in Afghanistan, we will never have a way of knowing.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Tam Turse is a photojournalist working in New York City. Her photos of the demonstration discussed in this piece can be viewed by clicking here.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

Billions over Baghdad

Two excellent reporters, Donald Bartlett and James B. Steele, tell the story of corruption in Iraq.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/10/iraq_billions200710

The War in Iraq and NCLB

Hold on… Wait a minute!!!
Lets have some accountability here.
National news is filled with the reports of General Petraeus and Ambassador
,
Bush Administration spokespersons can not and will not state what they will do to improve the war situation in Iraq. They will not state what is the cost and what will be the result. We are asked to support this.

What about No Child Left Behind?
The Bush Regime and the California legislature demands that schools be held accountable. We must show progress in the schools. Even though NCLB was under funded by $25 billion per year.
Well- if you spend $50 million a month in Iraq with no measures and no accountability, but the Bush Regime refuses to fund NCLB, where is the accountability?
Why do we under fund our schools and demand accountability, but fund the war in Iraq and not demand accountability?
It seems that we value imperialist intervention more than our own children.
The Bush Administration has gotten us into a war that will continue for at least ten years. The Middle East is in turmoil. The wars involving Iran, the Kurds, Saudi Arabia, and others is in a downward spiral. Many more U.S. soldiers will die.
Why do we support imperialist intervention and not public education for our children?
Duane Campbell
What can you do? See prior posts. Call, write, e mail, Congressman George Miller about NCLB changes.
see: http://www.cta.org/issues/esea/__ESEA_NCLB+Overview.htm

Cheney: 1994 on Iraq

Getting Out of Iraq: the Youtube debate

The Democratic Party Debate : the war

Most colassally inept and incompetent administration in U.S. history

As Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson put it, “This is the most colossally inept and incompetent administration in American history.” 
And Wilkerson spent more than three decades in the Army


Iraq Intelligence Horror Stories Shouldn’t Be Old News 
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor 

Hearing horror stories about the manipulation of Iraq intelligence is like watching “The Exorcist” again and again: Each time you see something new and laugh at the parts that used to make your hair go up straight.


Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq. 

It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon’s worldwide spying operations. 

In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam. 

One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department’s number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government’s national security apparatus. 

Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia. 

“He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “ which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me. 

“He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’ 

“He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’ 

“And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’ 

‘That’s too bad,” Feith said. 

The audience howled. 

“That was the end of the interview,” Lang said. “I’m not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out.” 

Feith, of course, like the administration’s other Israel-connected hawks, didn’t want “Arabists” like Lang muddying the road to Baghdad, from where — according to the Bush administration theory — overthrowing Saddam Hussein would ignite mass demands for Western-style, pro-U.S. democracies across the entire Middle East. 

Lang’s story is merely an illumination of what the Senate Intelligence Committee said in drier language May 25, that the White House was warned before invading Iraq that creating a stable democracy there “would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent process.” 

Suddenly the Cassandras are everywhere. These days you can’t drop a Blackberry between Capitol Hill and Dupont Circle without it being stepped on by a former intelligence official with prepared testimony or a book proposal. 

For those of us who have been around Washington for more than awhile, it’s unprecedented. 

There were defections from the Johnson administration over Vietnam, more with the Nixon administration’s invasion of Cambodia — and of course there were Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a historical record of official deceit on Indochina. 

But back then intelligence officials didn’t quit one day and the next day write real-time books exposing the machinations of current, or near-current, defense and intelligence leaders. 

When one did in 1974 — dissident CIA executive Victor Marchetti, who wrote “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” an expose of how the agency overthrew governments, etc. (with John Marks, a former State Department intelligence analyst), there was an uproar. 
Shrugs 

Today, there are fewer uproars than shrugs, weekend news blips. Even George Tenet’s memoir has already started falling down the rungs of The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. 

One reason might be that readers don’t think he’s telling the truth — and too late, at that. 

But another may be that the public has already concluded that, at least when it comes to the Middle East, the president and his men are — not to put too fine a point on it — dopes. Or worse. 

As Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, appearing on the same panel with Lang, put it, “This is the most colossally inept and incompetent administration in American history.” 

And Wilkerson spent more than three decades in the Army. Even coming from the right hand man to the Bush administration’s former secretary of State, however, who was at the center of every intelligence controversy related to Iraq, that’s hardly news anymore. 

Still, with the added value of hindsight, their anecdotes still have a fresh punch. 
Here’s Another From Lang 

“I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him — this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, ‘You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.’ 

“He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They’re going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there’s going to be a massive insurgency.’” 

“He said, ‘No, no, they’ll be glad to see us,’” Lang continued. “This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.’ 

No, Lang told Wolfowitz, “that’s not gonna happen. It’s just an impossibility. They’re not like that. They don’t want to be us.” 

Not everyone agrees with all of Lang’s views about the Arab world, but on this issue he was prescient, of course, as were almost all experts on the region outside of the neocon faithful. 

How come we learned so much of this dispute only after the war? 
Face Time 

Wilkerson provides a damning clue. 

In February 2003, Powell’s top aide relates, he “spent five of the most intimate days of my life, and five nights, without sleeping, as did my team, staring into . . . the face” of George Tenet, Tenet’s deputy John McLaughlin, and other top CIA officials working on Iraq, at the agency’s headquarters at Langley. 

It was the eve of Powell’s now infamous speech at the United Nations detailing Iraq’s alleged biological, chemical and nuclear programs. 

“One of the things Secretary Powell and I told Mr. Tenet and Mr. McLaughlin at the outset of our frenetic five or six days, trying to get ready for the U.N., was ‘multiple sources.’ We will not take anything and put it in this presentation, unless there are multiple, independently corroborated sources for the items we’re putting in the testimony,” Wilkerson said. 

“That was the going-in position.” 

Subsequently, he learned that there was but “a single source for the mobile biological laboratories; that his code name was Curveball; and that there were several very key dissents as to this individual’s testimony, during or before the preparation of the secretary of State.” 

Curveball, an Iraqi refugee, turned out to be a liar. 

“None of that, ladies and gentlemen, none of that was revealed to the secretary of State, or to me, or to any member of my team, by either John McLaughlin or George Tenet,” Wilkerson said. 

Tenet says in his memoir that he never heard of any serious questions about Curveball. 

As readers of this column know , however, Tenet’s chief of European operations, Tyler Drumheller, insists he sent a flurry of warnings about Curveball to Tenet’s deputies. 

Both can’t be right. 

“Either George Tenet is lying through his teeth, or Tyler Drumheller is lying through his teeth,” Wilkerson says, “with regard to one of the most important pillars of Secretary Powell’s presentation at the United Nations: the mobile biological laboratories.” 

We’re waiting now for a third CIA official to come forth with an answer. 
Duped 

The other “pillar” for the invasion, of course, was Saddam Hussein’s alleged connection to al Qaeda. 

Now everybody knows that, too, was bogus. 

But in Wilkerson’s hands this “old news” seems fresh — like watching Tony Perkins creep up on Janet Leigh in “Psycho” again. 

Wilkerson relates how he and Powell were dubious about the Saddam-al Qaeda link the White House was pushing, and were trimming back that section of Powell’s draft on the eve of the speech. 

“All of a sudden, we were told that a high-level al Qaeda operative . . . had been interrogated and . . . revealed that there was major training going on by . . . Saddam Hussein’s people — of al Qaeda operatives in how to use chemical and biological weapons,” Wilkerson said. 

“This was quite a revelation, and, as you can imagine, changed the secretary’s mind about how much he was going to include about contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in his presentation.” 

But that, too, it turned out, was phony. 

“One definition of news,” a mentor told me long ago, “is what people have forgotten.” 

If that’s so, then the horror stories of Iraq can be told again and again. 

And here’s one reason why they should be: CIA veterans are leaving in droves. 

The other night I was talking with a recently retired top CIA operations officer, a man who had been a station chief in several foreign capitals. 

“This government — what have they done to themselves?” he vented. 

“They took a fine intelligence service,” he said, “and managed to destroy it in two administrations.” 

I’m probably way out of step, but to me that’s still news.

from Congressional Quarterly 

http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002520554.html

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

The bloody war continues

Can You Believe This War Is Still Going On?

By Jim Hightower,

Hightower Lowdown


* 3,300 American troops and hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis are dead.

* Rumsfeld said the Iraq attack would cost $50 billion.
The tab so far exceeds $500 billion.

* Almost two million Iraqis have fled the country and
only 30% of kids can go to school.

On Easter Morning, George W. made another of his
periodic shows of Standing With The Troops. He attended
church services in the chapel at Fort Hood in Kileen,
Texas, after which he offered to the assembled media
this pious little announcement: "I had a chance to
reflect on the great sacrifice that our military and
their families are making. I prayed for their safety. I
prayed for their strength and comfort. And I pray for
peace."

He prayed for our troops' safety? How clueless is he?
George, you have the troops stuck in another country's
vicious civil war. They're under attack from every
direction by every faction, every hour of every day,
hit by car bombs, roadside bombs, chlorine bombs, IEDs,
suicide bombs, rocket fire, mortar rounds, snipers, and
assassins. There is no safety in Iraq.

He prayed for peace? George, YOU made this war. Don't
put it on God! The ONLY reason that America is in Iraq
is because you, "Buckshot" Cheney, Rummy, and the rest
rode us into an invasion and occupation on a pack of
lies.

God didn't do this, YOU did. Praying won't get it done.
God helps those who help themselves. You have peace in
your own hands.

Yet the war goes on

Only three days after George the Pious told us about
his prayers for safety, strength, comfort, and peace,
his Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, announced that all
active-duty soldiers already in Iraq or going there
will have their tours of duty extended from 12 months
to 15. "Our forces are stretched," Gates admitted, but
he said that this added burden is "necessary" in order
to carry out Bush's latest war strategy, his "surge"
scheme. The extension order affects 100,000 soldiers.
Plus their families. Bear in mind that many of these
families have already gone through two or three tours
in Iraq.

Back at Fort Hood, where Bush prayed, families were
angry. "A year is so long apart you hardly know your
husband," said Nichol Spencer. "Now they're making it
longer?"

Theresa White said, "To a civilian, three months is 12
weeks. To an army wife, three months is the straw that
broke the camel's back."

Of course, that's three more months in hell that Bush
is committing these people to endure (this from a guy
who could not even complete an Easy Street tour of duty
stateside in the "champagne unit" of the Air National
Guard during the Vietnam War). To add insult to injury,
after saying that he had prayed for the "comfort" of
these soldiers and their families, Bush didn't even
have the courtesy to inform them in advance that the
extension was coming. "It was disrespectful," said
Mindy Shanahan, also from Fort Hood. Her husband is in
Iraq and will now be stuck there an extra three months,
assuming he survives. "We should have had at least 48
hours notice, instead of having to see this on CNN,"
she said.

Prolonging the time soldiers must spend in Iraq hides
one of the military's other little problems: Very few
Americans want to join Bush's war. Not even those young
Republicans who say they so enthusiastically support
the war are willing to bet their lives on it. So, in a
country of 300 million citizens, recruiters are
straining to meet a quota of roughly 80,000 new
soldiers a year, much less find more troops to cycle
into Bush's surge. The military has already raised the
maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42, which means that
if you and your wife had kids when you were 20 and
you're now 40, the whole family could go to war.
Wow--the Brady Bunch does Iraq!

Despite doubling the number of felons permitted to
enlist and lowering the minimum standards so more
high-school dropouts and people with low
mental-aptitude scores can be taken, the Pentagon still
is not getting enough volunteers. Even recent West
Point graduates, the Army's elite, are saying "no
thanks" to Iraq, choosing to leave active-duty service
at the highest rate in more than three decades.

Yet, the war goes on

Bush's war, now in its fifth year, has already lasted
longer than World War II. On Easter Sunday, as George
was saying his prayers, the number of American military
deaths in Iraq was approaching 3,300. And now, with his
surge, the rate of U.S. deaths is on the rise. All this
killing has prompted more eloquence from the
commander-in-chief: "Make no mistake about it. I
understand how tough it is. I talk to families who
die."

Then there are some 24,000 soldiers who haven't died
but instead have come home maimed and traumatized,
including more than 1,300 who've lost arms and/or legs,
and more than 4,600 who've suffered severe head or
brain injuries. Many of them have been sent to the
"comfort" of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, just a
short hop from Bush's hangout at the White House. There
they have been greeted with horrific conditions and
cold indifference.

When news of this scandal broke, Bush feigned surprise
and expressed obligatory outrage. But, wait, George --
you're the president, you're in charge of this
disgrace! It's your Pentagon budget (now above
half-a-trillion dollars a year) that has been lavishing
money on favored contractors while quietly snipping
away at funding for Walter Reed. A review panel
concluded last month that your Pentagon was aware of
this neglect, yet it still cut funds even as the
hospital was being inundated with thousands of severely
maimed soldiers returning from Iraq. The panel said the
hospital is now beyond repair.

It's not just Walter Reed, either. The nationwide VA
system is overwhelmed with patients and experiencing
crucial shortages in staff and facilities. As of
January, there was a backlog of 600,000 vets awaiting
care--nearly a third of whom have been waiting six
months or longer. All this on your watch, George--while
you've been demanding that war critics "support our
troops." Meanwhile, your current budget proposal
reduces funding for veterans' care in 2009 and
2010--just when the military expects that the influx of
wounded will peak.

Yet, the war goes on

Asked in January 2003 what the price tag was for the
Bushites' upcoming Iraq attack and occupation, Donny
Rumsfeld said that the budget office forecast "a number
that's something under $50 billion."

Not quite right. Iraq is now costing us $6 billion a
month (the surge will be extra), and total direct costs
through this year will top $500 billion. Included in
that is $12 billion that was airlifted in 2003 to the
interim Iraqi government in shrinkwrapped stacks of
$100 bills (the load weighed 363 tons) and promptly
disappeared. Poof...gone!

Add in such indirect costs as veterans' long-term
health care and replacement of the military hardware
consumed by the war, and the tab runs to $1.2 trillion
or more. David Leonhardt, a New York Times economic
analyst, has itemized some other things we could've
bought with that sum instead of the mess in Iraq. His
list includes:

* TEN YEARS of universal health care, covering every
American who is now without it. * DOUBLING the cancer
research budget. * GLOBAL IMMUNIZATION of the world's
children against measles, whooping cough, tetanus, TB,
polio, and diptheria. * UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL for every
3- and 4-year-old child in America. * RECONSTRUCTION of
New Orleans. * IMPLEMENTATION of all of the 9/11
Commission's recommendations.

Yet, the war goes on

Being positive is one thing, but George W has gone from
positive to delusional. Last year, in a rhetorical
reach to claim that things were looking up in Iraq, he
offered this: "I think--tide turning. See, as I
remember--I was raised in the desert, but tides kind
of--it's easy to see the tide turn."

He might ask the Iraqi people about tide-turning
progress in his war. Outside of Baghdad's
four-square-mile fortress known as the Green Zone,
where the U.S. brass and Iraqi political elite reside,
life is miserable. Violence erupts constantly and
unpredictably, fear is everyone's companion, jobs are
scarce, going anywhere is dangerous, basic services are
practically nonexistent, and distrust, frustration, and
anger rule.

An official UN count puts last year's death toll of
innocent Iraqi civilians at 34,452--three times higher
than the U.S. had admitted. Another 36,685 were
wounded. One analysis puts the civilian death toll much
higher--a total of 655,000 since the invasion.

Some 2 million Iraqis (16% of the population) have fled
the country, including 40% of professionals (one third
of doctors fled, 2,000 have been murdered). Three
thousand people a day are fleeing--so many that Saudi
Arabia (Bush's superrich ally in his war) is building a
560-mile fence to keep them out. By the way, the U.S.
allowed only 202 Iraqi refugees into our country last
year.

Another 1.6 million Iraqis are displaced within their
country, forced from their homes by various factions in
the civil/religious war. Many of these are children.
Only 30% of Iraqi children attended school last year
(pre-war, nearly 100% percent were in school). Children
routinely witness violence and killings that are often
gruesome, including seeing family and friend die. A
recent study of 2,500 grade school children in Baghdad
found that 70% showed symptoms of trauma.

While Bush brags that his war has liberated women, in
reality there has been an explosion of violence against
them, including widespread abductions, public beatings,
rapes, "honor killings," torture, beheadings, and
public hangings. The president of the Iraqi National
Council of Women goes nowhere without a bodyguard. "I
started with 6," she said, "then I increased to 12, and
then to 20, and then to 30." One of the women in Iraq's
parliament said bluntly, "This is the worst time ever
in Iraqi women's lives."

Yet, the war goes on

Lest we forget in the foggy mist of Bush's rationales
for his war (WMDs! al Qaeda connections! Democracy for
the people!), Iraq sits atop the world's second-largest
oil reserve. The proven reserves are 112 billion
barrels, with a probable pool in excess of 400 billion
barrels. At current prices, that's about $25 trillion
worth of crude.

When certain outrageous commentators (like me)
suggested at the start of the war's build-up that an
oil grab could be involved, Rumsfeld barked to the
media, "It has nothing to do with oil, literally
nothing to do with oil." Could that have been another
Bushite lie?

Yes. Big Oil has long wanted to get its hands on Iraq's
vast reserves. In a 1998 speech, Chevron's CEO said,
"I'd love Chevron to have access." Big Oil's wish is
Bush's command, and as early as December 2002, just
before the invasion, the state department's
oil-and-energy working group was saying that Iraq
"should be opened to international oil companies as
quickly as possible after the war."

In 2004 Bush & Company drafted a secret legislative
proposal to deliver this national treasure to the oil
giants. This February, the proposal was introduced to
the Iraqi parliament, and now the Bushites, oil
lobbyists, and a handful of Iraqi pols are urgently
trying to pass it.

This law would transform Iraq's oil reserves from a
nationally owned resource to a privatization model,
opening two thirds of the known oil fields (and all
fields discovered in the future) to control by Big Oil.
Instead of having Iraq's parliament make the major
decisions over oil, an unelected authority called the
Federal Oil and Gas Council would take charge. And
guess who would have seats on the council? The major
oil corporations!

This autocratic group would then decide who gets the
contracts to extract the nation's oil. That means Big
Oil would be approving its own bids! Also, the
corporations would not have to hire Iraqis, reinvest
profits in Iraq, or share new technologies. Foreign
interests would even be allowed to divvy up the
territory now, hold their pieces of the action until
after the current civil war settles down, and then move
in to grab profits.

Yet, the war goes on

If you think that maybe our selfannointed "war
president" is in over his head, ponder this bit of
strategic insight from George: "No question that the
enemy has tried to spread sectarian violence. They use
violence as a tool to do that."

Uh, yeah...and it seems to be working. Bush's surge
strategy is intended to concentrate our forces in
Baghdad to rid the capital of violence. But since the
surge began, residents have not noticed any lull in the
carnage, instead experiencing a record number of car
bombings. On April 12, the Green Zone itself got a
wake-up call when a suicide bomber detonated himself in
the parliament's cafeteria, killing three lawmakers and
five others.

Meanwhile, knowing that the U.S. surge was coming and
would last for only a few months, the deadly Shiite
militias based in Baghdad have simply stood down to
wait out Bush. With U.S. and Iraqi forces surging in
Baghdad, the bloodshed has spread to the countryside.
In late March, for example, two massive truck bombs
ripped through the town market in Tal Afar, killing 48.
In response, Shiite militia went on a revenge spree
against Sunni residents, killing some 60 of them.

Then there's the Kurdish zone in the north, which had
been rather calm...until now. The Iraqi constitution
cobbled together by the Bushites a couple of years ago
contains a provision requiring a referendum on the
future of the region's capital city, Kirkuk. Now,
because two sides want to control this wealthy city, a
new front has opened in the Iraq war.

On one side are the Kurds, who have set up their own
essentially autonomous government in the north and have
well-armed, battleseasoned militias ready to fight for
the land they claim as their own. Opposing them are the
Arabs, who were moved into the Kurdish zone by Saddam
Hussein years ago but now consider it to be theirs.
They are also heavily armed and--follow the bouncing
ball here--they are backed by the government of
neighboring Turkey, which is fighting a Kurdish
independence movement inside its own borders.

Literally underlying this explosive ethnic imbroglio is
one of the world's largest oil reserves, which means
Big Oil also has a keen interest in "winning"--whatever
that involves. To add to the nasty potential, Iran
cares very much about this fight and has deployed
security forces to the border it shares with the
Kurdish zone.

The government in Baghdad, under enormous pressure (aka
blackmail) from Kurdish legislators, has just decided
to back the Kurds' claim--and the Arab side in Kirkuk
is already setting off bombs in Kurdish neighborhoods.

Yet, the war goes on

In a tragi-comic bit of presidential posturing, Bush
assembled a dozen or so veterans, soldiers, and family
members in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White
House for a media show on March 23. With these human
"stage props" lined up behind him, George lashed out at
congressional Democrats for passing a bill requiring
withdrawal from Iraq next year. Without even a smile of
irony, Bush called the Democrats' effort "an act of
political theater."

Well, this particular withdrawal bill won't get the job
done, but it's a reflection of the broad public demand
to stop this horrible folly. Roughly two thirds of
Americans want out of Iraq by next year, and 54%
support a cutoff of funds for Bush's surge. Even the
troops in Iraq want a withdrawal, for only 35% of those
polled by Military Timeslast December said that they
approve of George W's handling of the war.

Still, some progressives despair. They say that last
year's elections were a clear mandate for withdrawal,
but the Democrats have been weak and the killing
continues, so what's the use? That's right on the
facts, but totally wrong on the attitude. We made great
strides last year, and we've changed the national
debate on the war. Yes, Bush and Cheney are boneheads,
and the Democratic leadership has Jello in its spine,
but what did you expect? Popular movements have always
had to muster the tenacity to overcome
disappointments-- and ours is no different. Come
on--we've got 'em on the run! Far from being down, take
energy from the gains we've made--and keep pushing on.
No one is going to stop the war but us.

From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower
and Phillip Frazer, May 2007. Jim Hightower is a
national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and
author of "Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our
Country And It's Time to Take It Back."
(c) 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

_______________________________

Democrats and Republicans give Bush the money for war

Published on Friday, May 25, 2007 by The Progressive
Feingold, Kucinich Denounce the Democratic Cave
by Matthew Rothschild

And so the Democrats caved, pathetically, to Bush and to Bush’s war.

“It tells American workers that the only way they will get an increase in wages is to continue to support funding the war which is taking the lives of their sons and daughters,” Kucinich said.

No amount of extenuation can minimize the fact that the Democrats, who were brought to power in Congress to end the war, have just signed on to another $120 billion for that war.

There is not even a timetable for withdrawal, just 18 benchmarks that the President himself can waive.

What an abdication!

What a capitulation!

Even as U.S. soldiers are increasingly bogged down in Baghdad, even as the death toll of our troops zoomed past the 3,400 mark, the Democratic compromisers in Congress could not find enough spinal fluid to stand tall against Bush and the inevitable you-don’t-support-the-troops ads that they fear so much.

Well, they’re going to have to summon the courage to withstand those ads at some point, or they’ll end up voting for an additional hundred billion dollars down the road.

With this vote, they’ll be consigning hundreds of additional soldiers to their deaths.

Largely to blame for this is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who mindlessly trumpeted the bill as some sort of an accomplishment.

“For heaven’s sake, look where we’ve come,” he said. “It’s a lot more than the President ever expected he’d have to agree to.”

Is it really?

Bush essentially got everything he wanted. No timetable. No mandatory benchmarks. And all the money he needs to keep waging the war.

Also to blame is Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, who is an old Clinton triangulator. “I view this as the beginning of the end of the President’s policy,” he somehow managed to mutter.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi showed no leadership on this issue. She even helped broker a deal that she herself can’t abide. “I’m not likely to vote for something that doesn’t have a timetable,” she said. So why did she go along?

At least two Democratic members of Congress distinguished themselves in their opposition to this primitive cave.

Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin said: “I cannot support a bill that contains nothing more than toothless benchmarks and that allows the President to continue what may be the greatest foreign policy blunder in our nation’s history. There has been a lot of tough talk from members of Congress about wanting to end this war, but it looks like the desire for political comfort won out over real action.”

And Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio exposed the hideousness of one of the strategies of the Democratic leadership: to salt the bill with an increase in the minimum wage.

“It tells American workers that the only way they will get an increase in wages is to continue to support funding the war which is taking the lives of their sons and daughters,” Kucinich said. “First, blood for oil. Now, a minimum wage for maximum blood. Aren’t the American people giving enough blood for this war without having to give more to have a wage increase?”

Not a penny more should be spent on this war, except to get our troops out of there.

That’s what the American people want.

And it is the height of cowardice and negligence for the Democrats to give Bush what he wants, instead.

Update: Barbara Lee Condemns Iraq Bill

On the House floor on May 24, Representative Barbara Lee issued the following statement:

“Mr. Speaker, in 2003 Congress approved a $78 billion dollar supplemental. In 2004 it was $87 billion. In 2005 it was $82 billion. In 2006 it was $72 billion. And now the administration wants almost $100 billion more?

“As of today, 3,429 of our brave troops and countless Iraqis have died in this occupation. The President has dug us into a deep hole in Iraq and it boggles my mind that Congress wants to give him another blank check to buy more shovels.

“This occupation and civil war cannot be won militarily. Mr. Speaker, how many will have to die before this House stops writing blank checks?

“Mr. Speaker, the American people are looking to Congress to end this failed policy and bring our troops home.

“Two months ago, we took the Lee Amendment to the Rules Committee, which would have fully funded the safe and timely withdrawal of U.S forces from Iraq. That is what we should be voting to do today, not to give the President another blank check. I urge my colleagues to vote against this bill.”

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

© 2007 The Progressive

Edwards Statement on Congressional Passage of the Iraq War Funding Bill (5/24/07)

John Edwards released the following statement today following Congress' passage of an Iraq war funding bill:


"Washington failed America today when Congress surrendered to the president's demand for another blank check that prolongs the war in Iraq. It is time for this war to end.
"Congress should immediately use its funding power to cap troop levels in Iraq at 100,000, stop the ongoing surge, and force an immediate drawdown of 40-50,000 troops, followed by a complete withdrawal in about a year.

"The American people's call for a new course in Iraq was not answered today, but Congress still has the power to end this war. Our security and democracy alike demand it."





*************************************

Video: U.S. Army in Iraq

John Bruhns, a former sergeant in the Army, stuck his neck out when he went to Iraq and now he's doing it again, by speaking out against the president.

He's the subject of a new TV ad made by Oliver Stone—the culmination of our VideoVets project.

Right now, the president is trying to bully Congress into submission over the Iraq Accountability Act by slamming them for "not supporting the troops." John's voice—and other Iraq veterans' voices—can counter that. They can tip the debate toward ending the war. Will you chip in $20 to help us get these vets on the air? Please click below to watch the ad and contribute to air it.

https://pol.moveon.org/donate/videovets2.html?id=10286-2950289-6RSeAL&t=3


John said in an interview on CNN that he hopes Americans will see his ad and realize that "there are veterans that are coming home from this war that are very patriotic, that love America, but just are not going to blindly follow this president and this failed policy continually."1

Out of Iraq bill

JONATHAN TASINI
Progressives Introduce End The War Legislation
READ MORE: Iraq, Jonathan Tasini, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters
At 2 p.m. Eastern today, Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee (co-chairs of Progressive caucus, which has roughly 64 members) and Maxine Waters (chair of Out of Iraq Caucus, roughly 74 members) are introducing comprehensive End the War legislation, answering Bush's challenge that Democrats provide alternative proposals. It's called The Bring the Troops Home and Iraq Sovereignty Restoration Act.


While I haven't seen an exact copy of the proposed legislation, I can tell you the basic details of what it will say. It's important for everyone who believes in bringing this war to an end that we get out and blog on the bill--and force the MSM to give this alternative broad coverage.
I understand that initially the co-sponsors will be joined by thirteen others (including Barney Frank, John Conyers, Jim McGovern, Dennis Kucinich, Diane Watson, Maurice Hinchey, Jerry Nadler and Raul Grijalva). Here are the details:
1. The bill fully funds a 6-month withdrawal of US forces and military contractors (from the date of enactment of the bill) from Iraq.
2. It repeals the authorization for the use of force. This is key, in my humble opinion, because it takes away any remaining authority to wage war in Iraq and, hopefully, reestablishes the Congress' power to wage war.
3. It prohibits the building of any permanent military bases in Iraq, which has clearly been the Pentagon's plan.
4. It provides economic and political aid to the Iraqi people and their government. When ever I've written and spoken about this issue, I've been clear that, while the U.S. cannot play any military role in Iraq, we are morally obligated to help rebuild a country out government destroyed.
5. The bill fully funds the VA Health Care system for all military veterans.
6. As I understand it, the bill draws on language from other bills aimed at an exit from war to peace and puts it into a package they hope to rally lawmakers and grassroots behind.

Let's spread the word.
From: The Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-tasini/progressives-introduce-en_b_38881.html