Tom Hayden : Despite WikiLeaks, Congress Votes War Bucks

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Image from The First Post.
Despite WikiLeaks revelations,
Congress votes for war funding

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / August 2, 2010

Never was the case so weak for throwing another $33 billion into the Afghanistan sinkhole, but that's what a defensive U.S. Congress did anyway on Tuesday evening, July 27. The vote was 308-114, with Republicans supplying most of the pro-war votes.

Washington-based peace groups, after weeks of e-mailing messages to Congress, put the best face possible on the vote, claiming a "significant" gain of 14 additional antiwar votes over the 100 cast for a similar amendment by Representative Barbara Lee two weeks ago.

(The new Democratic votes were cast by Corrine Brown, Kathy Castor, John Conyers, Rosa Delauro, Lloyd Doggett, Anna Eshoo, Chaka Fattah, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Hank Johnson, Marcy Kaptur, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Gregory Meeks, James Moran, Christopher Murphy, Carol Shea-Porter, Mike Thompson, Lynn Woolsey and David Wu; while five Republicans joined the opposition: Paul Broun, Vernon Ehlers, Jeff Flake, Phil Gingrey, and John Linder.)

Those casting pro-war votes from safe liberal districts included Lois Capps, James Clyburn, Susan Davis, John Hall, Patrick Kennedy, Nita Lowey, Lucille Roybal-Allard, John Sarbanes, and Joe Sestak. Significantly, Speaker Nancy Pelosi abstained from voting, which meant retreating from the chance to draw an antiwar line more firmly.

The highest measure of House opposition remains the 162 votes, including Pelosi's, cast in the House recently for Representative Jim McGovern's amendment requiring an exit strategy including a withdrawal timeline. Only 18 senators voted for an identical amendment by Senator Russ Feingold earlier this spring. The dissenting numbers have almost doubled since last year.

In the moments after Tuesday's vote, a representative of Barbara Lee's office said new antiwar measures may be put forward around the defense appropriations bill later in this session. No concrete plan yet exists.

Those Congressional anti-war votes are in part due to years of grassroots work and mobilization, according to Rusti Eisenberg of the legislative committee of United for Peace and Justice. Is the glass half-full or half-empty?, she asks.

What is clear is that there was never a better time to stop or delay this war. The political climate around Afghanistan turned extremely sour in the days leading up to Tuesday's vote. The Washington establishment was shaken by the spilling of 91,000 classified documents by the independent muckrakers at WikiLeaks.org. The raw documents revealed a much grimmer situation in Afghanistan than portrayed by the White House and the Pentagon with its information-war strategy.

As millions read the WikiLeaks revelations in The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, a nervous White House pressed for an immediate House vote. "We don't know how to react. This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood," lamented one White House official.

The president could have declared that the newly released materials only add to a growing consensus that the war is unwinnable. Instead he sent his spokesperson Robert Gibbs out to discredit the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who is fast becoming a hero in the global info-wars.

Gibbs was offended by a German interview with the elusive Assange, in which he said "I enjoy crushing bastards," a sentiment that will do him no harm with Assange's readers and collaborators.

The Pentagon also is seeking to muzzle and imprison the American Private First Class Bradley Manning, 22, charged with downloading the documents and sending them to Assange. Manning, who is known by his hacker name Bradass87, copied the secret information on a CD labeled "Lady Gaga" while pretending to hum along to her music.

"I want people to see the truth, the non-PR version," said Manning. While downloading the materials, he had discovered "awful things that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a darkroom in Washington, DC... I just couldn't let these things stay inside of the system and inside of my head."

Manning calls his action "open diplomacy... It's beautiful and horrifying. It belongs in the public domain."

WikiLeaks founder Assange announced Monday that he has another 15,000 documents ready to release.

For now, funding for the escalation has been salvaged by the House vote. But the full impact of the documents remains to be seen. If the Pentagon finds a way to shut down WikiLeaks, it is likely that a huge media and public protest will follow. Going forward with upbeat messages about the war becomes hazardous for Obama too, especially with the release of more documents threatened. Pressures thus will increase here and across the NATO alliance to begin reducing the military presence.

On the very day the disclosures were splashed across front pages, American officials were quarreling with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai over whether 52 civilians were killed by Western rockets in Helmand Province, a scene of the current offensive. And, according to official sources interviewed by Dexter Filkins of The New York Times, Karzai is "pressing to strike his own deal with the Taliban and the country's archrival, Pakistan, the Taliban's longtime supporter."

Instead of bending to these apparent realities, Obama instead seems intent on doubling-down with the military offensive in Kandahar and his secret attacks in Pakistan.

No one in the government has found a way to stop him, despite 73 percent of Democrats and a majority of independents opposing his Afghanistan policy. By voting for war funding without conditions, Congress has yielded its checks and balances function, and now is being usurped and outperformed in its oversight responsibilities by the twentysomething geeks of WikiLeaks.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His books include The Port Huron Statement, Street Wars and The Zapatista Reader.]

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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Capitol Hill : Gone Fishing

Congress Still Corrupt and Useless
By Marc Ash / June 26, 2008

For those who thought Tom Delay's departure would really change anything in Congress, this past week was a strong cup of coffee. On Capitol Hill, politics and greed still trump the good of the nation, still trump the Constitution, still trump all.

While nothing that happened in Washington this past week was new or should have surprised anyone, we were nonetheless served clear notice, anew, that this is a democracy under siege.

In one week, Congress authorized one hundred and sixty two billion US taxpayer dollars to extend for another year the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq, and rewrote federal law to specifically pardon criminal actions by the nation's largest telecommunications companies. No one really noticed that a retired US general bluntly accused the Bush administration of war crimes. He could just as easily have accused Congress of the same. They are just as guilty

It's often said that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. False. The vast majority of honest public servants in Congress are Democrats. However, it would not be safe to say that the majority of Democrats are honest public servants. About half of the Democrats and a small handful of Republicans take seriously their sworn oaths. The rest would be arrested in any other walk of life.

It has been reported in our publication and elsewhere that Democratic Congressional leaders sought to address the issue of war funding as quickly as possible. Some in Democratic leadership feared that the issue might prove a burden in an election year. A political consideration. In the end, Democratic leadership accelerated, without significant opposition, the pace at which the latest war funding bill was brought to a vote. It passed well before it was required and well before the fall elections. The die is cast, the nation is committed to another year of bloody war and all of its crimes, so that we can vote for the leaders who took this action without having to think about it.

In December 1974, Seymour Hersh, writing for The New York Times, revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had, under orders from Nixon, violated its charter and engaged in warrantless domestic spying on American citizens, on American soil. The practice Hersh pointed out had been going on for years. Hersh's report led to the creation in April 1976 of the Church Committee, named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho. The Church Committee reports, which should be required reading for all Americans, detailed systemic warrantless domestic spying on and surveillance of Americans by a host of federal government agencies including the CIA, the IRS, the US Postal Service and the National Security Agency (NSA).

As a result first of Hersh's story and the subsequent findings of the Church Committee, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, (FISA). FISA's express purpose was to make illegal presidential directives that would authorize warrantless domestic spying. It might just as well have been called the Nixon Act because it was a direct consequence of his Stalinesque abuses. FISA worked well for roughly 23 years.

Enter George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, et al. Essentially Bush, Cheney, their families and allies are monarchists, autocrats and on occasion, when they feel the need arises, fascists. They have little patience with Democratic process, and less patience with Congressional interference. In short, to the Bush crew FISA was an insult. They deliberately and knowingly broke the law, directing the NSA to employ its electronic surveillance capabilities on American citizens on American soil without warrants, and enlisting successfully the aid and comfort of most of the nation's largest telecommunications companies in the illegal effort.

The Bush administration argues that it did so to protect Americans after 9/11. That argument is flawed for two reasons. First, all statutes that prohibit warrantless domestic spying point out specifically that such restrictions are not to be dispensed with due to - any - immediate threat, including national security, except as specified by law. Second, there is significant evidence that authorization for warrantless domestic spying came from the Oval Office well before 9/11.

Who, then, will confront those who would break the law under cover of executive privilege? Congress, of course, is designated under the Constitution to address violations of law by the executive branch. But not this Congress. This Congress, handed a sweeping mandate with one of the largest nationwide electoral victories in US history, a mandate from the American people for confronting massive illegality at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this Congress has utterly abdicated. This Congress has not only abdicated; it has capitulated and conspired to circumvent the Constitution. That is the FISA legislation that this Congress has passed. The war funding legislation is worse; it is authored in innocent blood and unending human suffering.

Today this US Congress stands in opposition to the Constitution, and in opposition to the American people. The American people might well be expected to stand in opposition to Congress as well.

Source. / truthout

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Student Throws Blood Money at Congress

Blood Money, David Dutrizac / Visual Studies Programme, Univ of Toronto.
CodePink action during war funding vote
June 20, 2008

During the vote on the House floor for money funds for war, Jason Ortiz, 24-year-old university student with CODEPINK , threw $164 bloodied one-dollar bills on to the House floor, representing the $164 billion for war that the House was allocating to continue the war in Iraq. The money, covered with red paint, symbolized the blood money that will guarantee more deaths of our soldiers and Iraqis in a senseless war that is not supported by the American people.

Before entering the gallery, Jason Ortiz stated, "Enough of my friends have sacrificed their futures so that corrupt politicians can profit from their misery. $165 billion more for war? Somehow, our elected officials can't find money for decent education, or healthcare for children, yet they continue to pump hundreds of billions of our money into their death machine. $165 billion more? That's enough to provide a college education for every single eligible student. Yet they make college unaffordable so they can force good, honest young people into the military, turning potential scholars into killers."

He went on to say, "We elected this Congress with a mandate to end the war, and they have done nothing except increase the funding. I simply cannot sit by and allow them to go unchecked. I have seen too many friends come back from Iraq mentally and physically destroyed. I am taking a stand for them, for the future of my generation, and the next generation. I am proud to do my part to show Congress that we are fed up with their lies and are not going to let them off easy. For all of my friends and family, for all the brave soldiers who have sacrificed their lives, for all the innocent Iraqi victims, I say enough is enough. BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW! FUND HUMAN NEEDS, NOT WAR! NO MORE BLOOD MONEY!"

Jason is currently being held in Capitol Police custody, Alicia Forrest and Desiree Fairooz (contact #s listed above) are available for comment as they were in the gallery at the time of the debate, vote and Jason's subsequent action.

Desiree Fairooz / CodePink

The compromise legislation angered leftist peace activists, who argued that Democrats won control of Congress in the 2006 election with a mandate to pull troops out of Iraq.

"We're disgusted that behind closed doors, the Democrats and Republicans in Congress have conspired with the White House to keep this war going well into the next administration," said Medea Benjamin of the anti-war Code Pink group.

"This is a complete betrayal of the American people who voted for a new Congress in 2006," she said.

Source. / AFP / Yahoo! News

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