========================================================= If the work of Online Journal� is important to you, we need your financial help to deal with our ever increasing workload and to cover our growing expenses. We labor 12-16 hours a day for you, now we must ask you to spare a few dollars to help us. Become a Friend of Online Journal� by donating whatever you can to further the cause. http://www.applyweb.com/public/contribute?oj ========================================================= 09-12-01 Attack on America: #1 and #2 http://www.onlinejournal.com/Attack_on_America/attack_on_america.html Special: September 11, 2001 and the aftermath >From the editor's desk: "Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin We have suffered a tragic loss of life as a result of the maniacal acts of suicidal fanatics, whether those fanatics turn out to be foreign or homegrown. While our deepest sympathy goes out to the families who lost loved ones, it is incumbent upon all those who cherish freedom not to capitulate to the forces that are now preying upon our emotions in order to take away more of our civil liberties. In a mere 11 months, we have suffered a stolen election, had five Supreme Court justices decide who would occupy the White House, have had that occupant give away the budget surplus to his rich friends and supporters, tank our economy, rip up the social safety net, thumb his nose at our allies, institute First Amendment Zones to keep his detractors corralled, and now terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yet, we are being told to rally to the White House occupant. Some among us are now even willing to call George W. Bush president, giving him the legitimacy he seeks. George W. Bush was not my president yesterday. He is not my president today. He will not be my president tomorrow. I say let us rally to our self-interests as a free people and to those of freedom loving people everywhere. We must not fall prey to inflammatory rhetoric declaring what happened is "an act of war," or likening it to Pearl Harbor. By shutting down all our airports, the Bush administration handed the terrorists a victory and caused untold harm to the already teetering economy. Let us rebuild the World Trade Center as a memorial to the victims of this senseless tragedy and as a monument to American resolve. We have arrived at a defining moment. We can sucumb to our baser instincts for vengeance or we can change direction in our dealings at home and abroad. We can spill more American blood and further enrich the weapons makers or we can reel in the corporations and remold our government to serve us. If we choose the former, no matter how many more of our civil liberties we surrender, we shall have no security and we shall know no peace. Having said the above, I have set up this section to provide a forum for Online Journal's contributors and readers to express themselves, even though some of their views do not reflect those of Online Journal's. Bev Conover Editor and Publisher Online Journal� Secrecy, democracy and national security By Carla Binion September 12, 2001-I wrote the bulk of the following article on government secrecy and democracy before the tragic terrorist strikes on New York and Washington, DC. However, I've updated it to include some facts relevant to terrorism, including the well-supported fact that our own government has sold weapons to terrorists on a massive scale. The magnitude of the loss of human life on September 11 has taken the nation's breath away, and our first concern should be taking care of the injured. At the same time, we have to think clearly and pay attention to facts and reason. Now is the worst possible time for the American people to fly off the handle in irrational rage or reactive fear. Political opportunists might try to use this sad moment in our nation's history to prey on American's lowest instincts, anger and fear, in order to manipulate public opinion to rally around bloating the military budget. They might also take advantage of this tragedy by trying to frighten already terrified Americans into giving up many of the civil liberties our ancestors fought so hard to win, in the name of "national security." While watching news coverage on September 11, I noticed a number of commentators said that from that day forward everything had changed; that it's now a whole different world. They said we should rally around Bush and other "leaders." Some, including, for example, former Vice President Dan Quayle, said we might now have to relinquish a number of our civil liberties. However, this would be a bad time for Americans to turn their backs on the very civil liberties America is really all about. As Ben Franklin once said, those people willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither. In addition, many things haven't changed in this country since the terrorist attacks. For example, the fact remains that certain U. S. officials have for years allowed our nation to sell massive amounts of weapons to potential terrorists (examples to follow.) Instead of rallying around politicians, who may or may not have our best interests at heart, we should focus on rallying around our fellow Americans. This is no time to let ourselves be manipulated into allying ourselves with those politicians who have consistently lied to us. On September 12, on a Fox Network morning program, Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary under Ronald Reagan, took advantage of the terrorist strikes to argue that we lost military capability during the Clinton years, because the military was "under funded." He said that due to the recent terrorist attacks, we now need total war and more military funding. On the same program, Weinberger also hearkened back to the mid-1970s and criticized a congressional investigating body, the Church committee, claiming that committee's almost 30-year old investigation of U. S. intelligence agency misdeeds had discouraged democracies from employing necessary "spies." He said a democracy needs spies in order to protect national security. Most of us agree a democracy needs to gather intelligence in sane, useful ways. But Weinberger misrepresented the Church committee's position. In reality, the Church committee investigated the fact that the CIA had violated its charter and broken the law by spying on American citizens who non-violently protested the Vietnam War or participated, non-violently, in the civil rights movement. The committee learned that the FBI had spied on and seriously harassed Martin Luther King and other peaceful demonstrators. The Church committee also found that the bureau had systematically disseminated anti-leftist propaganda to the public and tried to create conflict between members of protest groups in order to break up their movements. During the mid-'70s, both houses of Congress looked into massive FBI and CIA corruption and illegalities, including our then secret, arguably immoral foreign policy. The Church committee didn't conclude that America couldn't use spies, as Weinberger opportunistically implied on the day after the terrorist strikes. Instead, the committee said we need government oversight in order to prevent spies from abusing their power, and to keep them from mistreating American citizens and innocent people of other countries in the process of doing their work. In other words, the Church committee called for our intelligence agencies and other government officials to do their jobs in a moral and decent manner, and Weinberger knows that. Government secrecy is often bad for democracy and for the public's safety and security. In Blank Check, a book based on journalist Tim Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper series about the Pentagon's secret budget, Weiner writes: "In 1987, the CIA's director of covert action, Clair George, testified to a kind of mania that grips men empowered by secrecy: 'If you were ever on any given day to know all the plans that were being made inside the American government on all the subjects, you would be so terrified you would leave,' the spymaster said." Weiner again quotes Clair George, saying that behind the cloak of government secrecy is "a business that works outside the law . . . a business that is very hard to define by legal terms because we are not working within the American legal system." "A system that works outside the law breeds lawlessness . . . Secrecy conceals the costs, and suffocates criticism" of potential government misdeeds, says Weiner. In Challenging the Secret Government, (The University of North Carolina Press, 1996) Kathryn S. Olmsted writes that when Dick Cheney was Gerald Ford's deputy chief of staff, Cheney outlined options for dealing with Seymour Hersh after the journalist revealed information the government wanted suppressed. The Cheney options included "discussing" Hersh with his employer, the New York Times; a possible FBI investigation of the Times and Hersh; seeking grand jury indictments; and "getting a search warrant to go through Hersh's papers in his apartment." The White House decided not to prosecute Hersh because it didn't want to call further attention to his reports. It also feared the pursuit would win public sympathy for the journalist. (Olmsted's sources are notes and memos Cheney exchanged with other Ford administration staff members in May 1975.) While Cheney and Weinberger may be fans of government secrecy, it's important to remember that secrecy allowed Iran-Contra. As Tim Weiner notes, "The secret funding of the arms shipments to the Iranians and the contras cheated the Constitution's checks." Under the veil of secrecy, says Weiner, "Reagan . . . put his men to work cutting deals for the contras with dictators and communists, enemies and allies alike." In January 1986, Ronald Reagan signed a presidential finding authorizing CIA Director William Casey to hide Iranian arms shipments from congressional oversight committees. According to a memo from Iran-Contra principle and National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter, George H. W. Bush witnessed the finding. (From National Security Archive, referenced in Angus Mackenzie's Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, University of California Press, 1997.) Much of the money that funds the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) comes from the Pentagon's black budget. Tim Weiner points out that starting with Reagan's administration, the black budget mushroomed, and the Pentagon began hiding the costs of its most expensive weapons. The "version of the military budget made available for public consumption," says Weiner, showed that during the Reagan years the budget "doubled to roughly $300 billion, or a billion dollars a day, save Sundays and holidays." The Pentagon budget, notes Weiner is "the largest pool of public capital in the world." It has funded not only national defense, but also such things as "the National Security Council's gunrunning schemes" and "shipping half a billion dollars' worth of weapons halfway around the world to a murderous commando who revered the late Ayatollah Khomeini," Weiner writes. According to William D. Hartung (And Weapons for All, HarperCollins, 1994), the George H. W. Bush administration talked publicly of reining in weapons trading. But in practice secretly, the administration "concluded deals for the sale of more than $23 billion in U. S. arms to the Middle East alone" over a two-year period. Instead of trying to scale down the U. S. weapons trade in keeping with post-Cold War era realities, the Bush administration, says Hartung, expanded and refined the arms dealing "to levels that would have amazed even the most hard-line members of the Reagan administration." Hartung adds that the late Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez found direct evidence that the George H. W. Bush administration organized a cover-up of its military technology assistance to Saddam Hussein-a cover-up also involving the State Department. Gonzalez charged that the Bush administration was trying to hide "the true responsibility for the transfer of United States technology to the Iraqi war machine," which lies, "with the White House and the State Department, because they set technology transfer policy." Gonzalez added that the White House and National Security Council devised the cover-up in order to "mislead the Congress and the public . . . about the military nature of the transfers to Iraq." Hartung points out that, to this day, high government officials haven't been held accountable for the recent arms sales scandals. Congress has done nothing to remedy this and government investigations have been "derailed indefinitely." Governments sometimes justify secrecy by claiming certain covert actions are a matter of national security when, in fact, the secrecy is merely a cover-up for politicians' wrongdoing. "Secret powers naturally expand when unchecked," writes Tim Weiner regarding the cover-up of the extent of our nation's weapons build-up. "Two bombs became nearly 25,000 in less than twenty years . . . We have found no way down yet from the Everest of warheads we built." In Fortress America (Perseus Books Group, 1998), journalist Bill Greider says the arms industry is irrational in that it is "grossly too large" and far too costly to taxpayers. He talks about military waste. For example, the Pentagon has been dumping old tanks, sinking 100 Sherman M- 60s into Mobile Bay off the Alabama coast, giving 45 tanks free to Bosnia, shipping 91 to Brazil and 30 to Bahrain under a no-cost five-year lease. "One way or another, the Army has disposed of nearly six thousand older tanks during the last six years," Greider writes. He also notes that the Air Force "has so many long-range bombers it can't even afford to keep them in the air-and it still wants to build more." When budget constraints force the armed forces to choose between soldiers and weapons, they usually choose the weapons, says Greider-meaning they close bases and discharge soldiers while continuing to purchase arms. "For nearly fifty years," writes Tim Weiner, "the idea of national security has been expressed by nuclear weapons and covert actions. The world is changing in ways that make that definition self-defeating . . . We have chosen weapons over human needs: are we safer? We have fought scores of secret wars: are we more secure?" Admiral Eugene Carroll, U. S. Navy (Ret.), Director of the Center for Defense Information, says "We continue to spend nearly $300 billion a year for forces to fight in regional conflicts at the same time we are the world's leading seller of the arms which fuel those conflicts." (From William D. Hartung's And Weapons for All.) According to the 1998 Project Censored, "1998 Censored Foreign Policy News Stories," (Peter Phillips and the Project Censored group, Seven Stories Press): "[T]he last five times U. S. troops were sent into conflict, they found themselves facing adversaries who had previously received U. S. weapons, military technology or training." Tim Weiner points out in Blank Check that after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the CIA "bought an immense arsenal for the Afghan rebels." During the 1980s, the CIA spent around $3 billion smuggling weapons to the so-called holy warriors of the Afghan resistance. Weiner says the operation "started small: $30 million of weaponry a year in 1980. It grew to $100 million, then $500 million, then $700 million a year." Weiner continues, "The CIA's arms shipments to Afghanistan became the biggest covert operation in history, save its wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia twenty years ago." Eventually, says Weiner, "the CIA's pipeline leaked. It leaked badly. It spilled huge quantities of weapons all over one of the world's most anarchic areas." A dozen or more of the CIA's Stinger anti-aircraft missiles "would up in the hands of Iran's Revolutionary Guards," writes Weiner, and on October 8, 1987, "Revolutionary Guards on an Iranian gunboat fired one of those Stingers at American helicopters patrolling the Persian Gulf. American weapons, shipped abroad by the CIA, were aimed back at American soldiers." A secure nation is one not plagued by fear or danger, Tim Weiner concludes. When politicians claim our "national security" depends on government secrecy, do they define security in those terms? Or are they claiming security is based on covert arms trading-a lucrative practice for the arms traders, but both an economic drain and safety risk for U. S. soldiers and for average Americans? As Weiner suggests, our leaders can drain our nation's treasury for weapons. But they can't do so in secret and still claim we have an open democracy. In Fortress America, Bill Greider writes that we need an alternative view of national security. He says our current vision "sets up the nation as global cop, scurrying from one bonfire to another . . . inevitably collecting resentment and enemies, inviting a moment of miscalculation when things go terribly wrong and America gets scapegoated as the arrogant bully." "This is unlikely to change much," says Greider, "until American political leaders find the courage to confront these big questions and begin describing a genuinely different framework for national-that is, global-security." As part of that new framework, we need to construct "international security forces and mechanisms for conflict resolution that everyone can trust," Greider concludes. Trust is the operative word. Greider adds that it would help if America would "devote its diplomatic power (and sense of invention) to creating new institutions and strengthening old ones like the United Nations." In addition, people around the world, including our own American citizens, might trust the U. S. government more if our political leaders would take the lead in committing to making the global economic system work on behalf of everyone, and not just for the benefit of the very wealthy. Creating trust is essential for our nation's future security. We also need to bolster our international image of trustworthiness by honoring such agreements as the chemical and biological weapons treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the moratorium on testing nuclear weapons-all treaties and moratoriums the Bush administration has rejected. Would more money spent on a missile defense system or nuclear weapons have prevented the terrorism of September 11? Would the kind of government secrecy advocated by Caspar Weinberger, the kind that includes spying on innocent, non-violent dissenting Americans, have prevented that tragedy? If anything, our massive weapons sales to potential terrorists have endangered America, not made us more secure. Our often pugnacious foreign policy, rejection of treaties other nations have accepted, and refusal to embrace a more diplomatic, cooperative paradigm have arguably endangered us instead of making us more secure. We need to address terrorism by considering all those issues, not by reacting from our lowest instincts of rage, fear and greed-the very instincts behind the out-of-control weapons trade and the effort toward excessive government secrecy. Those instincts got us where we are today. Yes, we need security, but we won't get it through the old, outmoded, base instinct way of running this country and participating in the world. Our way of thinking about democracy and government secrecy needs to move to higher ground. We need to realize this country can be both powerful and consistently ethical at the same time. At this perilous moment, we should come together around that higher way of thinking and a new, more civilized political paradigm, appropriate to Twenty-First Century realities. Instead of rallying around just any politicians, we need to rally around our own higher human instincts, around our fellow citizens and around policies that can really work to give us a safer, more loving world. Copyright � 1998-2001 Online Journal�. All rights reserved. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content. ========================================================= WEB SITE HOSTING: Why put your web site on any old server, when you can have the same reliability, performance and security we enjoy? For more information go to: http://www.onlinejournal.com/Hosting/hosting.html ========================================================= __________ To unsubscribe: http://www.yourmailinglistprovider.com/unsubscribe.php?Editor This newsletter is hosted by http://www.yourmailinglistprovider.com
