Last week, Congress debated a resolution directing the President to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan no later than the end of this year. The Constitution gives the power to declare war to the Congress, so it is clearly appropriate for Congress to assert its voice on matters of armed conflict. In recent decades, however, Congress has defaulted on this most critical duty, essentially granting successive presidents the unilateral (and clearly unconstitutional) power to begin and end wars at will. This resolution was not expected to pass; however, the ensuing debate and floor vote served some very important purposes.

First, it was important to finally have an actual floor debate on the merits and demerits of continuing our involvement in the conflict in Afghanistan. Most congressional action regarding Afghanistan has concerned continued funding for the conflict. Thus, members of Congress have cloaked their support for an increasingly unpopular war in terms of financial support of the troops. But last week’s resolution had nothing to do with funding or defunding the war, but rather dealt directly with the wisdom of an open-ended commitment of U.S. troops (and hundreds of billions of tax dollars) in Afghanistan. Members opposing the resolution had to make their case for the ongoing loss of American lives as well as the huge expenditures required for an intractable conflict.

In my opinion, this was an impossible case to make.

Supporters of the war made the same intellectually weak arguments for continuing our occupation of a nation with a long and bloody history of resisting foreign occupation. Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.

The War Powers Resolution was passed in 1973 in the aftermath of Vietnam. It was intended to prevent presidents from slipping this country so easily into unwinnable wars, wars with indistinct enemies and vague goals. Unfortunately, it has had the opposite effect by literally legalizing undeclared wars for 90 days. In the case of Afghanistan, 90 days has stretched into nearly a decade. The original purpose of the initial authorization of force — to pursue those responsible for the attacks on September 11 — is no longer applicable. Al Qaeda has left Afghanistan; we are now pursuing the Taliban, who never attacked us. The Taliban certainly are not our friends, but the more of them we kill, the more their ranks grow and the stronger they become. Meanwhile, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan and accelerating our plunge toward national bankruptcy. Whose interests do we serve by continuing this exercise in futility?

Osama Bin Laden has said many times that his strategy was to bankrupt America, by forcing us into protracted fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union learned this lesson the hard way; and ultimately was forced to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in defeat and humiliation. This same fate may await us unless we rethink our policy and resist any escalation of our military efforts in Afghanistan. Our troops should be used for defending our country, making us safer and stronger at home — not for occupying foreign nations with no real strategy or objective.

[DoD photo by SSgt. Joshua Gipe, U.S. Army]

Statement of Congressman Ron Paul

United States House of Representatives

Statement Before Foreign Affairs Committee

December 10, 2009

Mr. Speaker thank you for holding these important hearings on US policy in Afghanistan. I would like to welcome the witnesses, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and General Stanley A. McChrystal, and thank them for appearing before this Committee.

I have serious concerns, however, about the president’s decision to add some 30,000 troops and an as yet undisclosed number of civilian personnel to escalate our Afghan operation. This “surge” will bring US troop levels to approximately those of the Soviets when they occupied Afghanistan with disastrous result back in the 1980s. I fear the US military occupation of Afghanistan may end up similarly unsuccessful.

In late 1986 Soviet armed forces commander, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, told then-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, “Military actions in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old. There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nonetheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels.” Soon Gorbachev began the Soviet withdrawal from its Afghan misadventure. Thousands were dead on both sides, yet the occupation failed to produce a stable national Afghan government.

Eight years into our own war in Afghanistan the Soviet commander’s words ring eerily familiar. Part of the problem stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. It is our presence as occupiers that feeds the insurgency. As would be the case if we were invaded and occupied, diverse groups have put aside their disagreements to unify against foreign occupation. Adding more US troops will only assist those who recruit fighters to attack our soldiers and who use the US occupation to convince villages to side with the Taliban.

Proponents of the president’s Afghanistan escalation cite the successful “surge” in Iraq as evidence that this second surge will have similar results. I fear they might be correct about the similar result, but I dispute the success propaganda about Iraq. In fact, the violence in Iraq only temporarily subsided with the completion of the ethnic cleansing of Shi’ites from Sunni neighborhoods and vice versa — and all neighborhoods of Christians. Those Sunni fighters who remained were easily turned against the foreign al-Qaeda presence when offered US money and weapons. We are increasingly seeing this “success” breaking down: sectarian violence is flaring up and this time the various groups are better armed with US-provided weapons. Similarly, the insurgents paid by the US to stop their attacks are increasingly restive now that the Iraqi government is no longer paying bribes on a regular basis. So I am skeptical about reports on the success of the Iraqi surge.

Likewise, we are told that we have to “win” in Afghanistan so that al-Qaeda cannot use Afghan territory to plan further attacks against the US. We need to remember that the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 was, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, largely planned in the United States (and Germany) by terrorists who were in our country legally. According to the logic of those who endorse military action against Afghanistan because al-Qaeda was physically present, one could argue in favor of US airstrikes against several US states and Germany! It makes no sense. The Taliban allowed al-Qaeda to remain in Afghanistan because both had been engaged, with US assistance, in the insurgency against the Soviet occupation.

Nevertheless, the president’s National Security Advisor, Gen. James Jones, USMC (Ret.), said in a recent interview that less than 100 al-Qaeda remain in Afghanistan and that the chance they would reconstitute a significant presence there was slim. Are we to believe that 30,000 more troops are needed to defeat 100 al-Qaeda fighters? I fear that there will be increasing pressure for the US to invade Pakistan, to where many Taliban and al-Qaeda have escaped. Already CIA drone attacks on Pakistan have destabilized that country and have killed scores of innocents, producing strong anti-American feelings and calls for revenge. I do not see how that contributes to our national security.

The president’s top advisor for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said recently, “I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the simplest sense, the Supreme Court test for another issue, we’ll know it when we see it.” That does not inspire much confidence.

Supporters of this surge argue that we must train an Afghan national army to take over and strengthen the rule and authority of Kabul. But experts have noted that the ranks of the Afghan national army are increasingly being filled by the Tajik minority at the expense of the Pashtun plurality. US diplomat Matthew Hoh, who resigned as Senior Civilian Representative for the U.S. Government in Zabul Province, noted in his resignation letter that he “fail[s] to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war.” Mr. Hoh went on to write that “[L]ike the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by [the Afghan] people.”

I have always opposed nation-building as unconstitutional and ineffective. Afghanistan is no different. Without a real strategy in Afghanistan, without a vision of what victory will look like, we are left with the empty rhetoric of the last administration that “when the Afghan people stand up, the US will stand down.” I am afraid the only solution to the Afghanistan quagmire is a rapid and complete US withdrawal from that country and the region. We cannot afford to maintain this empire and our occupation of these foreign lands is not making us any safer. It is time to leave Afghanistan.

If anyone still doubted that this administration’s foreign policy would bring any kind of change, this week’s debate on Afghanistan should remove all doubt. The President’s stated justifications for sending more troops to Afghanistan and escalating war amount to little more than recycling all the false reasons we began the conflict. It is so discouraging to see this coming from our new leadership, when the people were hoping for peace. New polls show that 49 percent of the people favor minding our own business on the world stage, up from 30 percent in 2002. Perpetual war is not solving anything. Indeed continually seeking out monsters to destroy abroad only threatens our security here at home as international resentment against us builds. The people understand this and are becoming increasingly frustrated at not being heard by the decision-makers. The leaders say some things the people want to hear, but change never comes.

One has to ask, if the people who elected these leaders so obviously do not want these wars, who does? Eisenhower warned of the increasing power and influence of the military industrial complex and it seems his worst fears have come true. He believed in a strong national defense, as do I, but warned that the building up of permanent military and weapons industries could prove dangerous if their influence got out of hand. After all, if you make your money on war, peace does you no good. With trillions of dollars at stake, there is tremendous incentive to keep the decision makers fearful of every threat in the world, real or imagined, present or future, no matter how ridiculous and far-fetched. The Bush Doctrine demonstrates how very successful the war lobby was philosophically with the last administration. And they are succeeding just as well with this one, in spite of having the so-called “peace candidate” in office.

We now find ourselves in another foreign policy quagmire with little hope of victory, and not even a definition of victory. Eisenhower said that only an alert and informed electorate could keep these war racketeering pressures at bay. He was right, and the key is for the people to ensure that their elected leaders follow the Constitution. The Constitution requires a declaration of war by Congress in order to legitimately go to war. Bypassing this critical step makes it far too easy to waste resources on nebulous and never-ending conflicts. Without clear goals, the conflicts last forever and drain the country of blood and treasure. The drafters of the Constitution gave Congress the power to declare war precisely because they feared allowing the executive unfettered discretion in military affairs. They understood that making it easy for leaders to wage foreign wars would threaten domestic liberties.

Responses to attacks on our soil should be swift and brief. Wars we fight should always be defensive, clearly defined and Constitutional. The Bush Doctrine of targeting potential enemies before they do anything to us is dangerously vague and easily abused. There is nothing left to win in Afghanistan and everything to lose. Today’s military actions are yet another futile exercise in nation building and have nothing to do with our nation’s security, or with 9/11. Most experts agree that Bin Laden and anyone remotely connected to 9/11 left Afghanistan long ago, but our troops remain. The pressures of the war racketeers need to be put in check before we are brought to our knees by them. Unfortunately, it will require a mighty effort by the people to get the leadership to finally listen.

The flooding which nearly wiped the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, La., off the map after Hurricane Katrina was caused by the Army Corps of Engineers failing to maintain a navigation channel through the city, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

District court judge Stanwood R. Duval, Jr. wrote that the Corps’ negligence in failing to maintain the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet canal “was not policy, but insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness.

“For over 40 years, the Corps was aware that the Reach II levee protecting Chalmette and the Lower Ninth Ward was going to be compromised by the continued deterioration of the MRGO . . . The Corps had an opportunity to take a myriad of actions to alleviate this deterioration or rehabilitate this deterioration and failed to do so. Clearly, the expression ‘talk is cheap’ applies here.”

The ruling awarded the six plaintiffs in the case $750,000 in damages, and opens up the possibility of class-action lawsuits, plaintiffs’ attorneys said. Lead attorney Pierce O’Donnell said the government’s liability could come to “billions” of dollars.

“It has been proven in a court of law that the drowning of New Orleans was not a natural disaster, but a preventable man-made travesty,” the attorneys said in a statement. “The government has always had a moral obligation to rebuild New Orleans. This decision makes that obligation a matter of legal responsibility.”

“The judge’s ruling today validates the feelings and beliefs that many citizens have held for four years,” New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said in a statement. “Although the ruling is liberating for thousands impacted by the devastation and tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, it is my hope that justice will prevail to help families make their lives whole again.”

The government is expected to appeal the ruling.

Katrina struck New Orleans on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, as a Category 3 hurricane. By the time it was over, 1,800 people had died and over 300,000 were displaced. The flooding caused by levee breaches destroyed large parts of the city and neighboring St. Bernard Parish.

View previous coverage of Hurricane Katrina here.

The VA mistakenly sent letters this month to at least 1,200 veterans informing them of disability benefits they could receive as sufferers of Lou Gehrig’s disease, according to the National Gulf War Resource Center. The VA disputes the number, saying that it sent 1,864 letters and only a “small number” were erroneous.

Jim Bunker, president of the veterans’ group, says it stands by its figures, while the VA has said it is still reviewing its files to determine how many people received the letter in error.

According to Bunker, the VA told him that a coding error was responsible. The VA uses codes to represent various diseases in patients’ files and it appears some patients had the wrong codes added to their files.

NGWRC has received numerous calls and e-mails from panicked veterans about the letter, far beyond the 10 the VA claims to have received. “Many of these veterans went to private clinicians to get a second opinion,” Bunker said in a statement on the NGWRC web site. “This second opinion outside of the VA is very expensive and can range from $1000 to $3000 or more.”

The VA has said it will personally telephone everyone who received the letter in error to explain the error and offer apologies. Veterans with concerns about the letter can contact the VA at 1-800-827-1000, according to a statement released Monday.

An Iraq war veteran once told me he thought his Veterans Administration doctor was trying to kill him. It seems the latest VA cost-saving trick is to try to frighten veterans to death. They need the money to pay for employee bonuses and nepotism, after all. Hospitals filled with mold, mice and cockroaches are no problem, veterans distressed by bureaucratic mistakes are no problem, as long as the bigwigs get paid. With your money.

The U.S. military paid just under $1 million for two 19 cent flat washers. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

C&D Distributors, LLC, bilked the Pentagon over ten years for $20.6 million in excessive shipping costs for a variety of small parts whose value rarely exceeded $100, according to acting Department of Defense inspector general Gordon Heddell. The problem is that the electronic acquisition system the military used to buy such small parts didn’t bother to check whether the shipping costs seemed reasonable. The company, and the surviving sister of the twins who ran the company, are awaiting sentencing, according to Heddell’s statement to the House Subcommittee on Defense Committee Appropriations Thursday at a hearing on defense outsourcing.

Nor is it hard to find examples throughout history. Heddell helpfully provided some dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War, citing letters from George Washington that vendors were overcharging him, and that suppliers often defrauded the Continental Army, such as contractors who “provided Continental forces with barrels of meat that were filled with stones and tree roots and provided other spoiled food rations, such as rancid flour. The contractors also provided Continental forces with gunpowder that had deteriorated, and thus was unusable.”

The situation today isn’t much different:

“Today, instead of debris-laden barrels of meat, contractors have built inadequate or unusable facilities, provided defective equipment and parts, stolen fuel, bribed contracting officials, grossly overcharged for goods, and failed to deliver products in a timely manner, if at all.”

The report goes on to list many other instances of waste, fraud and abuse committed not only by defense contractors, but by military contracting officers such as John Cockerham, who was to have received over $9 million in kickbacks for delivering hundreds of contracts to various unscrupulous suppliers during 2004 and 2005.

Heddell says the problem is that DoD’s acquisition workforce did not grow when annual defense spending more than doubled since 2001, allowing for more opportunities for fraud and abuse and reducing the ability of the department to conduct oversight. He stated that his office is “actively involved in aggressive audit planning” and has launched a web site to help auditors and others to detect fraud.

The problem is, of course, that few in the government are watching how your money is spent before it’s spent. It isn’t hard to find examples of waste, fraud and abuse throughout the government, in any agency. As Heddell was quick to note, such problems in government acquisition have existed since the dawn of the country, and likely since the dawn of time. One can find fraudsters even in the private sector if one looks hard enough, but it’s much easier and more profitable for criminals to defraud the big, lumbering, stupid government.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) may not become the Republican presidential nominee this year, but his campaign ignited the fires of liberty in millions of Americans and the revolution started last year has only just begun. Now comes The Revolution: A Manifesto, Paul’s clear, concise vision of how American liberty has been lost and how to get it back.

The Revolution hit the number one spot on theNew York Times bestseller list last week, in part due to a concerted book-buying campaign by Ron Paul supporters, and is still at number five this week.

I didn’t pick up a copy yesterday; instead I discovered that in a brilliant bit of forward thinking, the publisher saw fit to make it available to the Amazon Kindle. So I purchased an electronic copy and had it here in my hotel room seconds later.

If “Truth is treason in the empire of lies,” as Paul writes, then he has certainly committed treason by laying out the truth of the precarious state of the United States in 2008. With seemingly endless, senseless wars consuming our dollars and killing our brothers and sisters, recession today with economic collapse in the near future, and an ever-growing police state at home masquerading as security, homeland or otherwise, America stands at the brink of ruin.

Yet there is hope, and there is a way out. It was this hope which drew so many to Ron Paul’s campaign and which motivates them to continue their support even today, when his chance of becoming President is about the same as his vote percentage in the primaries. Wherever I go in these United States, I continue to meet people whose support of Ron Paul is unwavering because he is honest and his message is true.

I’ll quote briefly from the preface:

There is an alternative to national bankruptcy, a bigger police state, trillion-dollar wars, and a government that draws ever more parasitically on the productive energies of the American people. It’s called freedom. But as we’ve learned through hard experience, we are not going to hear a word in its favor if our political and media establishments have anything to say about it.

If we want to live in a free society, we need to break free from these artificial limitations on free debate and start asking serious questions once again. I am happy that my campaign for the presidency has finally raised some of them. But this is a long-term project that will persist far into the future. These ideas cannot be allowed to die, buried beneath the mind-numbing chorus of empty slogans and inanities that constitute official political discourse in America.

That is why I wrote this book. — Ron Paul, The Revolution

(As with other book reviews I’ve done, I won’t give away much of the book; hopefully just enough to convince you that it’s worth reading.)

Paul begins, appropriately enough, by analyzing the “false choices” with which questions of American policy are framed, demolishing the assumptions behind each of them that government must somehow involve itself in solving social and economic problems, when the truth is that, as Ronald Reagan said, “government is the problem.”

And one of the largest areas that government is the problem is in foreign policy. Paul points out again and again that the United States has strayed far from “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” as Thomas Jefferson advised. But he also pulls out powerful quotes from George Washington’s farewell address: “Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. . . . But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences. . . . The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. . . . Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?”

Why indeed should we listen to them? Times have changed, after all. Paul tells us why we should still be following “this sensible advice,” a part I won’t give away, and also points out that following that advice was one of George W. Bush’s many broken campaign promises.

While we’re at it, since times have changed, let’s just throw out that whole Constitution thing. Or, wait, we can’t do that, it’s not politically feasible, so we’ll just reinterpret it to mean whatever we want it to mean, like Alice in Wonderland. Ron Paul discusses the Constitution, along with modern day presidential executive orders and signing statements, showing how far we have gone away from the meaning and intention of the Constitution and how our society and country have been damaged as a result.

Jefferson’s approach to the Constitution — which he adamantly believed could be understood by the average person and was not some secret teaching that had to be divined by immortals in black robes — was refreshingly simple. If a proposed federal law was not listed among the powers granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8, then no matter how otherwise attractive it seemed, it had to be rejected on constitutional grounds. If it were especially wise or desirable, there would be no difficulty in amending the Constitution to allow for it. And according to Jefferson we should always bear in mind, to the extent possible, the original intention of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution. “On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”

“Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution,” Jefferson advised us. “Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.” — Ron Paul, The Revolution

This is obviously not what the Supreme Court does today. Instead they call it a “living document,” which means a blank paper by construction, on which any meaning can be attached. Paul asks if by doing so, America is not violating “the terms of its contract with the people, interpreting its words to mean something very different from what the American people had all along been told they meant?” A “living” Constitution, Paul says, is actually “a dead Constitution, since such a thing is completely unable to protect us against the encroachments of government power.”

Paul discusses next how government power is used to encroach on economic freedom, allowing some to benefit at the expense of others, with government as the gun-wielding middleman, why this is so harmful to everyone, even the supposed beneficiaries, and how true economic freedom would allow all to prosper at no one else’s expense. He exposes how special interest groups use government to obtain money and favors, and how both of these harm you.

He also discusses the encroachments on civil liberties and personal freedom and argues that personal freedom and economic freedom are inextricably linked; you cannot have one without the other. In discussing the war on terror and the police state that is growing up around it at home, Paul illustrates vividly how the government has scared people into giving up their essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety — and as we all know, we don’t even have that; since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, we’re more vulnerable than ever. Paul makes the case that “it is precisely during times of relative crisis that we should adhere most closely to the Constitution, not abandon it.”

Next, Paul discusses money. Everyone knows something is terribly wrong with the American economy, but few seem to know exactly what or why. Ron Paul explains clearly exactly what has happened: Why there was a housing bubble and why it burst. Why the dollar is tanking. Why the price of gas, food and everything else is skyrocketing. Along the way he gives a crash course on Austrian economics, after which money may actually start to make sense, and the scam which is fiat money in general, and the Federal Reserve in specific, by which everyone is stolen from, is laid bare.

Finally, Paul closes by explaining how we can get out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. If you’ve ever heard him speak, you know the answer already, and the answer is simple: Freedom.

Paul also acknowledges his nickname, “Dr. No,” and tells what he thinks of it. But I won’t give that away either.

The only thing I didn’t like about The Revolution is that it wasn’t published four months ago when it might have had a great impact on his presidential campaign. Nevertheless, this book is essential reading for every American who knows that something is deeply wrong with the country but can’t quite pinpoint it. You’ll find out where we’ve gone wrong and how we can start to set things right.

One of the requirements for a totalitarian police state is a system of kangaroo courts, star chambers which operate in secret and in parallel to the existing judicial system to convict political prisoners of pretended crimes against the state, which could never survive in the regular courts. And former judge Michael Mukasey, nominee for U.S. Attorney General to replace Alberto Gonzales, has proposed that the United States adopt such a system of courts.

In a little-noticed opinion piece in theWall Street Journal in August, Mukasey argued that terrorism trials in regular courts exposed too much information to the enemy, undermining national security. The existing legal system, he says, is “strained and mismatched” to the task of dealing out justice to those accused of terrorism.

Mukasey cites two proposals, one by former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger to authorize detention of suspects before they have committed any crime, and one by Andrew C. McCarthy and Alykhan Velshi of the Center for Law & Counterterrorism to create national security courts which would try suspects — foreigner and American alike — in secret. The McCarthy-Velshi proposal would apply to “international terrorism and other national security issues.”

Legal scholar Glenn M. Sulmasy was the first to propose a national security court to try suspects in secret. Sulmasy’s proposal would create National Security Courts, loosely based on courts-martial, which operate in secret, where defendants cannot obtain their own counsel unless the government agrees to grant the attorney a security clearance, and where defendants are tried at U.S. military bases and detained, imprisoned and executed at U.S. military brigs.

Most importantly, anyone, American or not, could be tried in a National Security Court, or as they seem to be called these days, Homeland Security Court.

“Another need for [homeland security] courts is to deal with the latest issues,” Sulmasy explained during his discussions with HSToday.us. “US citizens who turn their backs on the government and seek to overthrow it by engaging in jihad right now are treated differently than jihadists from other countries. A homeland security court would remove this disparity. . . .”

Commander Sulmasy, who’s been interviewed at length by HSToday.us in recent weeks, is the first permanent commissioned military law professor (appointed by President Bush in 2003) at the Coast Guard Academy, where he is an associate professor teaching international, constitutional and criminal law. He’s also a judge advocate, served on the faculty of the International Law Department at the US Naval War College and next year will be a National Security and Human Rights Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He’s written extensively in law journals on the legal challenges of adjudicating captured terrorists. — HSToday.us

It’s clear that, in the short term, some legitimate system is needed to deal with people who engage in hostilities with the United States. It’s not at all clear that a separate and parallel judicial system, which would sweep up ordinary innocent Americans accused of terrorism and other undefined “national security issues,” is the right answer.

Remember Guantanamo Bay, chock full of innocent people who were ordinary farmers one day and being waterboarded the next, because some bounty hunter wanted an easy $5,000? The government admits that of all the people it’s released from Guantanamo, 10 percent returned to the battlefield. What of the other 90 percent, who we can only presume were innocent, whose lives were disrupted for years by being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Federal district court judge John Coughenour, who presided over the trial of Ahmed Ressam, who attempted to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in the so-called millennium bombing plot, says that a separate judicial system is unnecessary.

It is regrettable that so often when our courts are evaluated for their ability to handle terrorism cases, the Constitution is conceived as mere solicitude for criminals. Implicit in this misguided notion is that society’s somehow charitable view toward “ordinary” crimes of murder or rape ought not to extend to terrorists. In fact, the criminal procedure required under our Constitution reflects the reality that law enforcement is not perfect, and that questions of guilt necessarily precede questions of mercy.

Consider the fact that of the 598 people initially detained at Guantánamo Bay in 2002, 267 have been released. It is likely that for a number of the former detainees, there was simply no basis for detention. The American ideal of a just legal system is inconsistent with holding “suspects” for years without trial. . . .

If confirmed, Judge Mukasey will join Michael Chertoff as another esteemed former jurist in the executive branch facing the formidable task of keeping our nation safe from terrorism. The distinction between the roles of judge and law enforcement officer should not be lost in the transition. Our courts ensure an independent process; they do not enforce the prerogatives of law enforcement. Any proposal that would blur this distinction would compromise a bedrock principle of government that has defined this country from its inception. — New York Times

But merely providing a system to try suspected terrorists in what could easily become a kangaroo court, a complete mockery of due process in which the innocent are convicted right along with the guilty, is just the beginning.

Terwilliger would like to see a national security court that could authorize preventive detention. So a judge could lock suspects up to stop them from committing a terrorist act — even if prosecutors can’t show that they’ve already committed a crime. Britain has a system like that, but the United States does not.

“The government will find a way to identify people who are dangerous and need to be incapacitated to neutralize the threat that they represent, because the people will demand that,” Terwilliger says.

He says the question is whether the government will incapacitate people by bending the rules of the system we have now, or by working within the rules of a new system that everybody signs on to. — National Public Radio

The Homeland Security Court, as effective as it might be for prosecuting real terrorists, would also open the way for innocent Americans to be picked off the streets and suffer the same treatment as innocent foreigners.

You won’t have to be brown skinned, wearing funny clothing, and praying to the east in order to be thrown into a military brig, given a secret trial where for the government justice is secondary to winning, and disappeared forever. These Homeland Security Courts, or National Security Courts, once established, will begin growing just like any other government program. It won’t be long before the government begins to expand the categories of people who are eligible for the secret star chamber process until virtually anybody could be disappeared for saying the wrong thing in public.

It can happen here. You could be next. Our system of government doesn’t make it impossible, only somewhat more difficult than in other countries. Innocence won’t protect you. It won’t even matter anymore.

And, as Judge Coughenour says, “This is a price too high to pay.”

Mukasey’s nomination was approved 11-8 Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee and has gone to the full Senate for confirmation. He faced harsh criticism over his refusal to state that waterboarding of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay was torture and therefore illegal under U.S. law. The Senate is expected to vote as early as Thursday.

Updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity include spying, spying and more spying.

The National Security Agency has run out of power, causing it to implement severe power-saving measures across the Fort Meade, Md., complex from which it runs acres of computing equipment to collect and process signals intelligence. Now, the NSA has implemented rolling blackouts and scheduled shutdowns of computer equipment to help keep it running at all. But it still hasn’t arranged for more power to be brought into the complex, despite having known about the problem for years.

Speaking of the NSA, last week the federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned an August 2006 decision that held that the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program was unconstitutional. The program monitors telephone calls and other communications entering and exiting the U.S. which the government says may have a connection to terrorists. The decision was overturned because the plaintiffs could not prove they had been directly affected by the program. Lawsuits related to the program remain alive in the Ninth Circuit.

In 2005, the Department of Defense was caught running an intelligence program which was collecting information on peaceful anti-war protesters. Much of the improperly collected data originated with the Department of Homeland Security. The database was cleaned up and later shut down. The Department of Defense Inspector General released a report (PDF) on the Threat and Local Observation Notice program saying that it complied with relevant law, though some information was improperly collected. But even though the database was shut down, NORTHCOM plans to bring back something like it.

Getting security right is a challenge for the best of us. But when you put security in the hands of government, getting it right is a virtually insurmountable obstacle. Here are a few ways government made you less secure and wasted your money over the last couple of weeks.

At Orlando (Fla.) International Airport, the Transportation Security Administration disposed of hundreds of “sensitive security information” documents by tossing them in the trash. Without shredding, burning or anything. Some of the documents were described as “excellent . . . for terrorists planning an attack.” A dumpster-diving teenager found them and turned them in to police.

And at O’Hare International Airport near Chicago, Ill., an ongoing investigation by CBS affiliate WBBM-TV found 47 “more” airport ID badges missing. The report says the station has discovered a total of 3,807 missing badges, that employees who complained about the missing badges were fired, that airport employees are not searched when entering the facility, and that some people “piggyback” or follow another employee into secured areas without swiping their ID badges.

Down on the border, Mexican officials are upset that a 2½ mile section of border fence in New Mexico was accidentally built on the Mexico side of the border due to surveying errors. Mexico wants the fencing removed from its territory “as quickly as possible,” which will cost at least $3 million.

Back inside the Beltway, Pentagon officials shut down 1,500 computers serving the Office of the Secretary of Defense after discovering a successful penetration into the office’s unclassified e-mail system. Unlike his underlings, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is unaffected, since as he says, “I don’t do e-mail. I’m a very low-tech person.” (Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has also said he doesn’t use e-mail.)

But would we be any better off if government could somehow be more effective and efficient? Likely not. The White House Office of Management and Budget published its annual Program Assessment Ratings Tool which measures the effectiveness and efficiency of some 1,000 federal programs. And Congress is going to spend some $1 trillion of discretionary spending on programs which aren’t even moderately effective. “The main activity these programs are really efficient at is spending your money in new and interesting ways on things they shouldn’t be spending your money on in the first place,” says Cato Institute director of budget studies Stephen Slivinski. “Slapping the ‘efficiency’ label on certain federal programs is a bit like putting lipstick on a pig.”

Have you ever been mellow? Hell no answer pulp fiction masters. Particularly the post World War II crew who wrote paperback originals for publishers such as Gold Medal and Lion Books. Though paperbacks got their mass market start in the late 30’s, WW2 pushed them over the hump. Our Boys picked up the paperback habit via Armed Service Editions of classic and popular lit. When Johnny came marching home he wanted more. Reprints of hardcover couldn’t meet the demand. Plus Johnny knew life could be war and war is hell and he craved something which reflected his insight. He craved pulp.

While Ike ruled the roost, pulp ruled the racks. Titles screamed bloody murder. Front covers were eyeball ecstasy with a nightmare twist. Half naked dames clung to or clawed at granite faced guys. Less lively bodies sprawled on the floor. Guns, booze, and cash were accessories in scenarios set in no-exit rooms at Hotel Sordismo. Crazed cops and gangsters were always on their way up. Pulp back covers were more verbal. Blurbs rhapsodized the sack and slug stuff within. Like — Harry knew the blonde was trouble. But the lush promise of Rita’s body blotted out the image of her husband’s punishing fists…

Those who think the 50’s were one big lock down have no idea how hard pop culture partied.

In 2007 pulp marches on, but covers have become more restrained. While some are designed with retro in mind a total revival of gonzo is needed. When Our Boys and Girls finally get back from Iraq, pulp should greet them as exuberantly as it greeted vets after WW2. Back cover blurbs might include:

As another reporter rose to ask a question, Dick felt the rage rise in his throat. Snarling he pulled the trigger.

Aw baby whined Bill as he slipped the Commander-in-Chief’s trousers over her head, you know you’re the only one.

With a groan of pleasure akin to torment, George surged into the Fertile Crescent again and again.

Want apocryphal plot? Try a synopsis ofThe Flesh is Weak.

After a 40 year stint in Iraq, GI Wes Duncan returns to his hometown of Oleo in upstate New York. Wes is bitter about being discharged. Arthritis is no big deal. Not kissing brass ass was the real squeal. Wes tries to hook up with old girlfriend Lil, who promised to wait forever. But Lil doesn’t remember Wes. Her grandchildren say “Alzheimers” but Wes figures Lil is playing him for a sucker. In retaliation, he takes up with her sister Madge. Madge is married to the mayor of Oleo, Lester Stemrott. Lester is about to retire and wants Madge to move with him into a HUD backed, assisted-living condo complex. But Madge isn’t ready for AARP Land. She wants to live it up on Lester’s graft. After a surprisingly athletic tryst at the Cozy Cocoon Motel (Wes throws his back out but Madge snaps it back) Madge and Wes hatch a plot to murder Lester and pin it on Lil. Madge and Wes kill Lester but the plan backfires. Lil’s memory turns sharp as a tack and she produces an air tight alibi — as well as photos of Madge and Wes at the Cozy Cocoon. Lil blackmails Wes and Madge. Wes sleeps with Lil to get the photos. Madge thinks he’s screwing her over for real. Madge shoots Wes and Lil and makes it look like a murder suicide. The next day a singing telegram from Uncle Sam arrives for Wes. Declaring I Want You Back.

Flesh, The Movie

In 2057The Flesh is Weak is turned into a big budget movie. (Yup, big budget movies still exist in the second half of the 21st century.) But some changes are made. The title becomesBack to Iraq and the ending is more upbeat. Wes survives being shot by Madge, returns to Iraq, and redeems himself by taking out a nest of Islamo-Fascists intent on blowing up a bus full of school children en route to the U.S. Academy of Islamo-Democracy. Wes is played by an uncannily well-preserved Tom Cruise. However, Tom’s sex scenes with the starlets playing Madge and Lil are performed by his body double. As the film’s producer puts it, “Pastrami makes a good sammy but sucks as eye candy.”

Back to Iraq is box office boffo. Still, film purists remember the low rent piece of fiction on which it was based and reference the late Quentin Tarantino, Saying HE would have made it the right way…

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

Sources include but are not limited to:

Over My Dead Body, The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945 to 1955, Lee Server, Chronicle Books, 1994

Books in Action, The Armed Services Editions, Edited by John Y. Cole, The Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 1984

Send comments or confidential tips to:

mailto:editor@mondoqt.com

The military desperately needs Arabic linguists in order to provide translation services in the ongoing war in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But at least one Navy linguist is no longer providing those much-needed services, because, for some in the Pentagon, there’s a war more important than the war on terror.

The war on gays in the military.

Arabic linguists are in short supply all over the government, and have been for many years. In the military, they provide critical battlefield intelligence which can save soldiers’ lives. This doesn’t matter to the brass back in Arlington, though. If you’re gay, it doesn’t matter if you’re desperately needed. You’re out.

That’s what happened to Stephen Benjamin, a chief petty officer in the Navy who served for two years providing Arabic translation services to troops on the ground. He was done in when he used the Army’s internal instant messaging system, exchanging casual — not explicit — messages with a soldier in Iraq that indicated that they both were gay. A later inspection of the computer system at Fort Gordon turned up 70 service members whose use violated policy in some way.

Benjamin tells his story in aNew York Times op-ed:

The result was the termination of our careers, and the loss to the military of two more Arabic translators. The 68 other — heterosexual — service members remained on active duty, despite many having committed violations far more egregious than ours; the Pentagon apparently doesn’t consider hate speech, derogatory comments about women or sexual misconduct grounds for dismissal.

My supervisors did not want to lose me. Most of my peers knew I was gay, and that didn’t bother them. I was always accepted as a member of the team. And my experience was not anomalous: polls of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan show an overwhelming majority are comfortable with gays. Many were aware of at least one gay person in their unit and had no problem with it.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” does nothing but deprive the military of talent it needs and invade the privacy of gay service members just trying to do their jobs and live their lives. Political and military leaders who support the current law may believe that homosexual soldiers threaten unit cohesion and military readiness, but the real damage is caused by denying enlistment to patriotic Americans and wrenching qualified individuals out of effective military units. This does not serve the military or the nation well. — New York Times

He also points out that since the Clinton-era policy was instituted, 58 Arabic linguists, already in short supply, have been kicked out of the military, compromising a critical intelligence mission in the war on terror.

In Tuesday’s Republican Presidential debate in Manchester, N.H., hosted by CNN and WMUR-TV, only Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said that gays should be allowed to serve in the military and that only “homosexual . . . and heterosexual behavior that is disruptive should be dealt with. It isn’t the issue of homosexuality, it’s the concept and understanding of individual rights.”

What’s it going to be, the war on terror, or the war on gays?

Until the military gets their collective heads out of their asses, you 58 Arabic linguists might consider serving on the civilian side at the National Virtual Translation Center.

For those who doubted that Rep. Ron Paul was a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, the debate Tuesday night in South Carolina put all doubts to rest. Paul stirred up a firestorm of controversy for suggesting that the Department of Homeland Security made national security even more inefficient after September 11 than before, and especially for his assertion that U.S. foreign policy over the past several decades contributed to the rise of Islamic terrorism.

But viewers at home responded, putting Ron Paul in second place in FOX’s own tamper-proof viewer poll.

As opposed to the largely conservative FOX viewers, MSNBC’s interactive post-debate poll, with more moderate viewers, puts Ron Paul squarely at the top of the heap among that network’s viewers.

And his assertions are not without merit.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office reported (PDF) that DHS “lacks a comprehensive integration strategy with overall goals, a timeline, appropriate responsibility and accountability determinations, and a dedicated team to support its efforts.” DHS still doesn’t have a plan to “deal with its many management challenges . . . could have serious consequences for our homeland security.”

Paul said during the debate that we had all the dots to put together the 9/11 plot and stop the attackers, but the bureaucracy was too inefficient to connect the dots. So in response, the government created even more inefficient bureaucracy.

Indeed, sharing of intelligence even between federal agencies, let alone with state and local agencies, still hasn’t improved that much since 9/11. Another GAO audit (PDF) last week found that the Homeland Security Information Network, meant to share intelligence with state and local officials, is doing a poor job and is largely redundant, since states and localities have already set up information-sharing networks, which DHS has failed to plug into. We’re little closer to being able to connect the dots, and all we have is a new “giant bureaucracy” eating up billions of taxpayer dollars to show for it.

That’s right, instead of real security, we’ve gotten real incompetence.

Citing the Central Intelligence Agency’s “blowback” principle, Paul explained that U.S. intervention in Middle Eastern affairs over the past several decades contributed to anti-American sentiment and helped create enemies, some of whom are today’s terrorists. This didn’t go over too well with Rudy Giuliani, who seems to know little about U.S. foreign policy for someone who supposedly led his city through the worst international terrorist attack in U.S. history.

“They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. … We’ve been in the Middle East,” Paul said in explaining his opposition to going to war in Iraq. “Right now, we’re building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting.

“They are delighted that we’re over there because Usama bin Laden has said, ‘I’m glad you’re over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.’ They have already now since that time they’ve killed 3,400 of our men and I don’t think it was necessary,” he continued.

“That’s really an extraordinary statement,” Giuliani said, interrupting FOX News panelist Wendell Goler. “That’s really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11. I would ask the congressman withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.” — FOX News

It goes back far before Desert Storm, as Paul pointed out, citing Reagan sending the Marines into Lebanon in 1983, saying “I will never turn tail and run,” and then pulling them back out after realizing just how “irrational” they are over there.

The only people who really reacted negatively to this were the handpicked debate audience, who applauded Giuliani for his ridiculous outburst and poor understanding of just what it is we’re up against.

While I rarely write about it, I follow the war in Iraq and other U.S. counterterrorism activities very closely. Ronald Reagan was right when he called them “irrational,” and so is Ron Paul. Indulge me for a moment while I quote from possibly the greatest military strategist of all time:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. — Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Sound familiar? The reason we’re suffering so badly in Iraq is that we’ve failed to know and truly understand our enemy. We failed in 1967, we failed in 1983, we failed in 2001, and we have failed today. The party line is that the Islamic jihadists hate us and our freedom and want to establish a global Islamic caliphate, dominating the world under Sharia law. Some people in this country claim that every Muslim wants this. (This is kind of like saying that the Church of Scientology represents all of Christendom.) The reality is quite a bit more complex than that.

Speaking of which, it’s probably more accurate to think of Al Qaeda and their associated jihadists as a religious cult. This is, after all, exactly how they act. We already know how to deal with religious cults, and it doesn’t involve long, protracted wars in the desert halfway around the world.

One last thing Ron Paul has been at pains to point out is that it’s left-leaning Democrats who have gotten us into the vast majority of conflicts in the last century, and conservative Republicans who have gotten us out of the vast majority of them. We must certainly be ready to defend ourselves from those who would attack us and have attacked us. If I’m around when somebody starts shooting people in a shopping mall, he’s getting two to the chest and one to the head. But we should not be picking fights, especially with people we don’t understand. We should instead open commerce and trade and let other countries sort out their own problems. That’s been the American way since the beginning, and it’s about time conservatives started being conservative again.

I’m apparently not the only person who thinks so; Ron Paul gained 25% of the vote in FOX’s more secure viewer poll of largely conservative viewers, coming in just behind Mitt Romney at 29% and far ahead of Guiliani at 19%. Supposed first tier candidate John McCain has fallen to the back of the pack with the rest of the second-tier candidates. It’s going to be much more difficult for the mainstream media to keep up their blissful, deliberate ignorance now.

Citing operational security and bandwidth usage concerns, the Department of Defense said Monday that access to 13 popular file and video sharing and social networking Web sites would be blocked from all DoD computers worldwide.

“The Commander of DoD’s Joint Task Force, Global Network Operations (JTF-GNO) has noted a significant increase in use of DoD network resources tied up by individuals visiting certain recreational Internet sites,” reads a memo (PDF) describing the change and signed by Gen. B. B. Bell, Commander, United Nations Command. “This recreational traffic impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth availability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.”

The 13 sites being blocked are listed as youtube.com, 1.fm, pandora.com, photobucket.com, myspace.com, live365.com, hi5.com, metacafe.com, mtv.com, ifilm.com, blackplanet.com, stupidvideos.com and filecabi.com. All of them typically consume high amounts of bandwidth.

(But someone apparently forgot to tell them that the site’s official name is filecabi.net.)

But the memo also makes clear, without using his name, that Lt. Gen. Charles Croom, who serves both as the head of the Defense Information Systems Agency and as commander of Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, is behind the move. — Government Computer News

The memo points out that the block applies only to DoD computers and networks; servicemembers are free to access the sites from non-DoD computers such as at Internet cafes and through commercial Internet service providers. The block doesn’t specifically apply to Iraq and Afghanistan since many of these sites had already been blocked in those countries.

Even in Iraq there are a handful of privately owned Internet cafes available on bases for troops who don’t want to wait through often long lines to access Pentagon-provided computers or who want to communicate over private networks. All Defense Department networks can be monitored. — United Press International

On May 3, the Army issued new OPSEC regulations which appeared to sharply restrict blogging by Soldiers and their families, prompting a backlash from milbloggers. By May 5, the Army had issued a statement clarifying that it primarily wanted Soldiers to attend OPSEC guidance and awareness training prior to posting, and did not restrict activities of family members.

In addition to using Internet cafes and personal computers off the DoD networks, many servicemembers use proxy servers provided by individuals back in the States, such as Circumventor, to access blocked sites.

DoD has had little success in blocking access to proxy servers. During September and October 2006, Homeland Stupidity ran Circumventor proxy servers and discovered nearly all of the people using them were deployed servicemembers in Iraq and Afghanistan who were trying to access Myspace, Facebook and other blocked sites. Since the addresses of proxy servers change frequently, it’s difficult for network administrators to keep up.

Servicemembers who want to use Circumventor should sign up for the mailing list (Link may be blocked by DoD; try it from home or an Internet cafe) to have new proxy server addresses e-mailed to them as they become available.

An officious bureaucrat with the U.S. Army has tried to intimidate the Federation of American Scientists into removing from its Web site a copy of the Army’s recently updated regulation on operational security. And FAS government secrecy project director Steven Aftergood told the bureaucrat in no uncertain terms to get lost.

In Cheryl Clark’s May 4 e-mail message, (PDF) she said that hosting a copy of Army Regulation 530-1 (PDF) was “illegal” because the document bears a For Official Use Only classification. It “is a FOUO publication, it is not intended for public release,” she wrote.

Clark tried to say that because the FAS is not an official Army Publications web site, “you can link to our publications, but you cannot host them.”

“Please remove this publication immediately or further action will be taken,” Clark wrote.

Most people would be appropriately intimidated, which was likely the intent. But the threat has no basis in law whatsoever. Aftergood’s public response sets the record straight.

“Our publications are not illegal nor in violation of any applicable regulation,” he wrote in his response.

“I have considered your request that we remove Army publications from the Federation of American Scientists web site,” I responded today. “I have decided not to comply.”

By law the Army cannot copyright its publications, the response explained. Nor is FAS, a non-governmental organization, subject to internal Army regulations on information policy. . . .

To eliminate potential confusion, we added a disclaimer to our Army doctrine web page indicating that the FAS collection of Army records is not an official Army source, and directing readers to several such official sites. — Secrecy News

The new regulation has been criticized in recent days because of its potential negative effects on military bloggers, effects which the Army denies.

Now a copy of the document is mirrored here, too. Come and get it while it’s hot!