It claims that only 26.3 perent goes to “National Defense”. This is similar to the claim in the 1040EZ US income tax form booklet (see pages 36-37). Here are those two pages in a PDF. There the claim is that the U.S. government only spends 22 percent of its money on “National defense, veterans, and foreign affairs.” The form admits that you could leave out the “foreign affairs” part and still be at 21 percent.

The White House website claims to calculate both veterans’ expenses and foreign affairs separately and still put “defense” alone at 26.3 percent.

However, take a look now at the pie chart created by the War Resisters League, which shows 51 percent of the budget going to the military.

Twenty-one percent and 26.3 percent and 51 percent aren’t even close to each other.  This is not “good enough for government work.”  This is our money.  What gives?

Well, the White House website and the income tax form play a number of dirty tricks on us.  The income tax form lumps Social Security and Medicare into the budget even though they are not funded with income taxes and are not discretionary spending.  Take that money out, and the 1040EZ now tells us that the military makes up 32 percent of national public spending.  But the White House website claims to be dealing just with income tax when it puts military spending at a mere 26.3 percent.

The tax form says it’s using FY2009 numbers, while the White House says it’s dealing with FY 2010, as does the pie chart.  But the numbers haven’t changed THAT much.  The tax form and the pie chart are including veterans costs.  Adding those in on the White House website gets us to 30.4 percent.  That’s a little bit more honest a number, but still a long ways from 51 percent.

To review, the 2009 tax form puts military and veterans spending at 32 percent, the 2010 White House website at 30.4 percent, and the 2010 War Resisters chart at 51 percent.  Something still needs to be explained.

Part of the explanation is surely that a chunk of federal spending is payment of interest on debt, and most of that debt (80 percent according to the War Resisters League) is for past military expenses.  Both the tax form and the White House website lump all debt together as something separate from the military.  Applying the WRL calculation to the numbers on the White House website would bring its actual total military spending to 36.3 percent.  That’s a good bit more than the 26.3 percent any casual reader of the White House website will come away thinking goes to the military.  But it remains far short of 51 percent.

I can’t tell from the posted explanations, but very likely a couple of things are happening.  First, we spend a great deal on military operations through departments other than the “Department of Defense.”  The State Department hires mercenaries.  The Energy Department builds nukes.  There’s a whole new department called “Homeland Security.”  The CIA apparently has enough cash sloshing around that the President can secretly authorize it to arm a force in Libya sufficiently to take on another force we helped arm in Libya.  The bulk of our “foreign aid” consists of giving weapons (or cash with which to buy U.S. weapons) to countries we may one day fight wars against.  The War Resisters League seems to be trying to calculate all of these things.  The White House probably isn’t.

Second, even though the year 2010 has already happened, when its budget was originally laid out, it didn’t include a “supplemental” (off the books) spending bill for wars.  This is a nifty little gimmick the Obamabots inherited from the Bushies after having campaigned against it.  I would be less than shocked if the supplemental was still being left out of the White House numbers as if it had never happened.

In addition, there is a fundamental problem of honesty on the White House website and in the income tax booklet.  Both refer to the military as “defense,” while most of the expense has absolutely nothing to do with defense.  We build weapons for which no enemy exists.  We build bases halfway around the globe.  And the Justice Department justifies wars, such as the latest one in Libya, without even trying to claim there is anything defensive about it.

We are not spending 26 percent on defense.  We are spending 51 percent on the military.

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie.”

Colin Powell in 2005. Photo/Wikimedia

In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball’s videotaped confession, Colin Powell is demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball’s unreliability. The trouble is, they did.

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world’s media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall. What an insult to the entire world that would be.

Colin Powell doesn’t have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on February 5, 2003. It’s on videotape.

I tried to ask him about it in the summer of 2004. He was speaking to the Unity Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The event had been advertised as including questions from the floor, but for some reason that plan was revised. Speakers from the floor were permitted to ask questions of four safe and vetted journalists of color before Powell showed up, and then those four individuals could choose to ask him something related – which of course they did not, in any instance, do.

Bush and Kerry spoke as well. The panel of journalists who asked Bush questions when he showed up had not been properly vetted. Roland Martin of the Chicago Defender had slipped onto it somehow (which won’t happen again!). Martin asked Bush whether he was opposed to preferential college admissions for the kids of alumni and whether he cared more about voting rights in Afghanistan than in Florida. Bush looked like a deer in the headlights, only without the intelligence. He stumbled so badly that the room openly laughed at him.

But the panel that had been assembled to lob softballs at Powell served its purpose well. It was moderated by Gwen Ifill. I asked Ifill (and Powell could watch it later on C-Span if he wanted to) whether Powell had any explanation for the way in which he had relied on the testimony of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law. He had recited the claims about weapons of mass destruction but carefully left out the part where that same gentleman had testified that all of Iraq’s WMDs had been destroyed. Ifill thanked me, and said nothing. Hillary Clinton was not present and nobody beat me up.

I wonder what Powell would say if someone were to actually ask him that question, even today, or next year, or ten years from now. Someone tells you about a bunch of old weapons and at the same time tells you they’ve been destroyed, and you choose to repeat the part about the weapons and censor the part about their destruction. How would you explain that?

Well, it’s a sin of omission, so ultimately Powell could claim he forgot. “Oh yeah, I meant to say that, but it slipped my mind.”

But how would he explain this:

During his presentation at the United Nations, Powell provided this translation of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers:

“They’re inspecting the ammunition you have, yes.

“Yes.

“For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

“For the possibility there is by chance forbidden ammo?

“Yes.

“And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there.”

The incriminating phrases “clean all of the areas” and “Make sure there is nothing there” do not appear in the official State Department translation of the exchange:

“Lt. Colonel: They are inspecting the ammunition you have.

“Colonel: Yes.

“Lt. Col: For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

“Colonel: Yes?

“Lt. Colonel: For the possibility there is by chance, forbidden ammo.

“Colonel: Yes.

“Lt. Colonel: And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.

“Colonel: Yes.”

Powell was writing fictional dialogue. He put those extra lines in there and pretended somebody had said them. Here’s what Bob Woodward said about this in his book “Plan of Attack.”

“[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light. Concerning the intercept about inspecting for the possibility of ‘forbidden ammo,’ Powell took the interpretation further: ‘Clean out all of the areas. . . . Make sure there is nothing there.’ None of this was in the intercept.”

For most of his presentation, Powell wasn’t inventing dialogue, but he was presenting as facts numerous claims that his own staff had warned him were weak and indefensible.

Powell told the UN and the world: “We know that Saddam’s son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam’s numerous palace complexes.” The January 31, 2003, evaluation of Powell’s draft remarks prepared for him by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (“INR”) flagged this claim as “WEAK”.

Regarding alleged Iraqi concealment of key files, Powell said: “key files from military and scientific establishments have been placed in cars that are being driven around the countryside by Iraqi intelligence agents to avoid detection.” The January 31, 2003 INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added “Plausibility open to question.” A Feb. 3, 2003, INR evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s remarks noted:

“Page 4, last bullet, re key files being driven around in cars to avoid inspectors. This claim is highly questionable and promises to be targeted by critics and possibly UN inspection officials as well.”

That didn’t stop Colin from stating it as fact and apparently hoping that, even if UN inspectors thought he was a brazen liar, US media outlets wouldn’t tell anyone.

On the issue of biological weapons and dispersal equipment, Powell said: “we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq.”

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK”:

“WEAK. Missiles with biological warheads reportedly dispersed. This would be somewhat true in terms of short-range missiles with conventional warheads, but is questionable in terms of longer-range missiles or biological warheads.”

This claim was again flagged in the February 3, 2003, evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s presentation: “Page 5. first para, claim re missile brigade dispersing rocket launchers and BW warheads. This claim too is highly questionable and might be subjected to criticism by UN inspection officials.”

That didn’t stop Colin. In fact, he brought out visual aids to help with his lying

Powell showed a slide of a satellite photograph of an Iraqi munitions bunker, and lied:

“The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions . . . [t]he truck you [...] see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong.”

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added: “We support much of this discussion, but we note that decontamination vehicles – cited several times in the text – are water trucks that can have legitimate uses… Iraq has given UNMOVIC what may be a plausible account for this activity – that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives; presence of a fire safety truck (water truck, which could also be used as a decontamination vehicle) is common in such an event.”

Powell’s own staff had told him the thing was a water truck, but he told the U.N. it was “a signature item…a decontamination vehicle.” The UN was going to need a decontamination vehicle itself by the time Powell finished spewing his lies and disgracing his country.

He just kept piling it on: “UAVs outfitted with spray tanks constitute an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons,” he said.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this statement as “WEAK” and added: “the claim that experts agree UAVs fitted with spray tanks are ‘an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons’ is WEAK.”

In other words, experts did NOT agree with that claim.

Powell kept going, announcing “in mid-December weapons experts at one facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents who were to deceive inspectors about the work that was being done there.”

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “not credible” and “open to criticism, particularly by the UN inspectorates.”

His staff was warning him that what he planned to say would not be believed by his audience, which would include the people with actual knowledge of the matter.

To Powell that was no matter.

Powell, no doubt figuring he was in deep already, so what did he have to lose, went on to tell the UN: “On orders from Saddam Hussein, Iraqi officials issued a false death certificate for one scientist, and he was sent into hiding.”

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and called it “Not implausible, but UN inspectors might question it. (Note: Draft states it as fact.)”

And Powell stated it as fact. Notice that his staff was not able to say there was any evidence for the claim, but rather that it was “not implausible.” That was the best they could come up with. In other words: “They might buy this one, Sir, but don’t count on it.”

Powell, however, wasn’t satisfied lying about one scientist. He had to have a dozen. He told the United Nations: “A dozen [WMD] experts have been placed under house arrest, not in their own houses, but as a group at one of Saddam Hussein’s guest houses.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “Highly questionable.” This one didn’t even merit a “Not implausible.”

Powell also said: “In the middle of January, experts at one facility that was related to weapons of mass destruction, those experts had been ordered to stay home from work to avoid the inspectors. Workers from other Iraqi military facilities not engaged in elicit weapons projects were to replace the workers who’d been sent home.”

Powell’s staff called this “WEAK,” with “Plausibility open to question.”

All of this stuff sounded plausible enough to viewers of Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. And that, we can see now, was what interested Colin. But it must have sounded highly implausible to the U.N. inspectors. Here was a guy who had not been with them on any of their inspections coming in to tell them what had happened.

We know from Scott Ritter, who led many UNSCOM inspections in Iraq, that U.S. inspectors had used the access that the inspection process afforded them to spy for, and to set up means of data collection for, the CIA. So there was some plausibility to the idea that an American could come back to the UN and inform the UN what had really happened on its inspections.

Yet, repeatedly, Powell’s staff warned him that the specific claims he wanted to make were not going to even sound plausible. They will be recorded by history more simply as blatant lies.

The examples of Powell’s lying listed above are taken from an extensive report released by Congressman John Conyers: “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War.”

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie.”

The second printing has lots of words blacked out. WikiLeaks claims to have a first edition, but hasn’t shared it. However, reading the bleeped-through version reveals plenty. [The New York Times, which obtained an advance copy of the book noted that the "secrets" contained in Operation Dark Heart have been previously reported.]

Shaffer and others in the military-spying complex knew about al-Qaeda cells and leaders in the United States before the 9-11 attacks and were prevented from pursuing the matter. Shaffer believes that effective action could have prevented 9-11. He so informed the 9-11 Commission, which ignored him.

The Defense Intelligence Agency retaliated against Shaffer for having spoken up. We already knew this, but the book adds context and details, and names names.

The bulk of the book is an account of Shaffer’s time in Afghanistan in 2003, and the title comes from the name of another aborted mission that Shaffer believes could have and should have captured or killed al-Qaeda leaders at that time in Pakistan.

Shaffer blames the CIA for screwing up any number of missions; for working with Pakistan which worked with the Taliban and al-Qaeda; for counter-productive drone attacks, and for torturing prisoners.

He also describes the insanity of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s scheme of sending armed soldiers door-to-door to win hearts and minds and flush out “bad guys.”

Shaffer doesn’t say whether people he helped capture were tortured, but proudly recounts helping murder people and interrogating people without using torture. He does, however, detail the interrogation he did of a man whom he repeatedly threatened with shipment to Guantanamo.

Bleeped out throughout the interrogation are repeated references to what is almost certainly the man’s identity as an American.

Shaffer’s book describes a web of incompetent rival bureaucracies within the military as well as the overlapping “intelligence community.”

What’s remarkable about this gang of gung-ho heroes and obedient cogs is not that they do so much damage but that any of them remain proud of having been a part of it.

Shaffer sure as hell does. He wants the drones to stop and the war scaled back, but he wants the kind of operations he favors to be pursued under an all-powerful commander in both Afghanistan and Pakistan — legal niceties be damned — until military “victory” can compel the negotiation of “peace.”

The 12 pages of advice on “How to Win in Afghanistan” that Shaffer tacked onto the end of the book, and on the basis which the book has been marketed, is a hodgepodge of contradictory recognition of hopelessness and insistence on prevailing.

This book has it all.  And to think that all this nearly perished in the flames [Below, blacked-out passages are represented as BLEEEEEEP]:

Models of heroism instilling confidence in our leaders:

“On Friday afternoons, three of my friends and I would hop in a car and drive the 100 miles to Tucson, drinking a fifth — or two — of vodka along the way.  Soon, I was working counterterrorism missions in the United States and Europe while still in the army reserves and having the time of my life. . . .

“I started having blackouts: I would start drinking in one place, wake up in another place, and not know how I got there. . . .  [S]ome of my bosses drank as much as I did.”

Deep insights into human motivation:

“We’d come halfway around the world to deal with an enemy that cared about nothing but their narrow interpretation of God.  They wanted to kill us simply because we did not think like they did.”

Dramatic tension and vegetable references:

“My team was gonna take to it like an eight-year-old to asparagus. We’d BLEEEEEEEP recruited a scout to help smooth our way with the villagers, but the CIA had maneuvered him out of the picture. Now we were going to be on our own without a native guide. Freakin’ CIA.”

Exemplary and tragic stands taken on principle:

“The CIA, it turned out, was running its own game, a game they didn’t bother to coordinate with anyone on the Defense side of the house.

“At one point, I was to learn later, we had an ugly experience with a warlord who was on their payroll. It was not that they played against both sides. It was the fact that they did it so obviously and poorly that pissed us off.”

The worst cliff-hanging ending to a chapter ever:

“Shortly after that meeting with Dave, our informants told us of a chilling development.  Bearded men, riding on Honda motorcycles, carrying Kalashnikov rifles and satellite telephones, were driving along the trails of the deep, treeless valleys in Zabul province about 100 miles southwest of Bagram. They were on their way.”

The worst beginning to the next chapter that could have been conceived of, with or without depicting people as insects or rodents:

“The Taliban were reinfesting southeast Afghanistan.”

Measured use of violence:

“‘What is your consideration of collateral damage?’ he asked.  ‘None,’ I replied.  ‘According to our information, there appears to be only true believers present with the target.’”

A keen eye for detail:

“For a moment, it was interesting to contemplate the Taliban as a bunch of Fred Flintstones. Nah. I couldn’t recall ever seeing a fat Taliban.”

Subtle foreshadowing:

“The same circumstances would reoccur: coalition and Afghan forces fighting to take ground in hundreds of villages like Deh Chopan throughout the region, holding it long enough to push out the Taliban, and then leaving, only to see the Taliban reemerge in the district unopposed.”

Passionate romance:

“I had been told by several friends about finding troops ‘doing it’ in cramped spaces like the small bomb shelters around our tent living area and Porta-Johns. Yeah, Porta-Johns.”

Clever imperialist banter:

“‘Wow,’ I said. ’But that’s Indian territory.’ I gave them the street location. ’It’s the heart of where the bad guys are hanging out these days.’”

Realistic unflinching looks at the front lines of the battlefield:

“We had to get back to Bagram before dark. Besides, the mess hall served Alaskan king crab on Friday nights, and you had to get there early before it got too rubbery.”

Even subtler foreshadowing:

“The graveyard sat on a high plain that overlooked Kabul against a backdrop of brown and gray rock mountains. Faded green Soviet vehicles — T-64 and T-72 tanks, BMP armored personnel carriers, BRDM armored cars, and more — were stretched out on a tan flat plain as far as the eye could see. Row after row of them.”

Inverted literary allusions based on movies:

“I thought about Willard’s journey up the river and into the ‘heart of darkness.’ Maybe we were going to have to do something to get at these guys where they lived; the remote area where Kurtz called his home was as remote as Wana to us.”

Insights into local customs:

“Dave and I put on our ‘Hajji hats’ — flat-topped Afghan hats worn by the local men.”

Massage cream sources that threaten national security:

I’d never given a massage in a combat zone before, but I dug out some hand cream with lotus flowers that I’d picked up at the BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP and figured it would do in place of massage oil.

Hints of a sequel:

We have to become involved in helping to shape and improve the message of the true Muslim faith.

David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press.  You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

Bruce Fein

Bruce Fein concludes his new book, American Empire: Before the Fall, by demolishing the worldview of Henry Kissinger as expressed in a Washington Post column last year.

Of course it’s also the worldview of the Washington Post and many of its readers: We must continue wars to save face. We must imagine we can win wars because facing defeat is too painful. We must talk about winning hearts and minds while increasing the bombings. We must plow ahead at full speed to demonstrate our determination, regardless of what it is we’ve determined to do.

Having played a leading role in a massive and historical defeat (and crime) using this approach, Kissinger’s wisdom is naturally widely sought. But Fein’s wisdom in taking him down — in a chapter and a book that really should be read by all Americans — draws on a longer historical view.

Fein is a conservative, in the sense of wanting to return in certain ways to an earlier America, specifically the one that existed before we had an empire. Fein refutes Kissinger’s fear mongering by building on the examples of the same that he has chronicled in earlier chapters.

Fein’s America is built on four documents: the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, President George Washington’s farewell address, and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ July 4, 1821, address.

Washington said: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Fein says: “What national security sense does it make for the United States to defend Croatia if it were attacked by Serbia over a border dispute, or by Russia as an ally of Serbia? If Croatia were swallowed by either, the effect on the liberty, safety, or welfare of Americans would be submicroscopic. Croatia, moreover, can contribute nothing to deterring or retaliating against an attack on the United States.”

How selfish! Should we just sit by while Nazis kill people? Don’t we have a responsibility to intervene militarily?

Fein thinks not, and thinks our nations’ founders thought not: “Liberty stands at the apex of the Constitution. But the Founding Fathers knew with a certainty that the liberties of American citizens would be crippled by any attempt to spread freedom abroad through military force. That mission would concentrate all power in the President and subordinate every liberty to national security clamors.”

Fein paints a portrait of America, the early years, including a Congress that stood up for itself against presidents, and a Congress that refused to launch wars of foreign conquest.

“She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” said Quincy Adams of America. Fein pinpoints the House vote to censure President James Polk for lying the country into a war with Mexico as “the last serious protest” against presidential imperialism.

Fein claims that the Mexican-American war was “the first occasion when American leaders wielded military power for the sake of domination.” This obviously ignores the slaughter of Native Americans, not to mention other escapades including the War of 1812, which was declared by Congress but was nonetheless driven by more than self-defense.

However, Fein is focused on the presidential acquisition of war powers, as he should be — as we all should be. After all, people can sometimes influence the Congress, and it is presidents who acquire power through war.

Fein chronicles various wars that presidents have lied our country into. But what about, at least the theoretical possibility of, wars of humanitarianism?

“Morality,” Fein writes, “even the prevention of genocide — is a constitutionally illicit reason for initiating warfare. . . . That does not suggest, however, that individuals representing only themselves might not be acclaimed for volunteering to fight for freedom abroad on behalf of oppressed peoples. The constitutional transgression arises when the United States government coerces or otherwise employs its citizens to fight in wars that are irrelevant to American sovereignty.”

Of course, oppressed groups tend to be labeled terrorists by the U.S. government, and providing them “material assistance” is now an offense punishable by endless imprisonment, but Fein’s goal is to eliminate such practices along with the wars that are used to justify them.

Fein takes on the argument that our nation has an interest in other nations practicing democracy, by demonstrating that democracies launch as many wars as any other countries. And, of course, wars do not tend to produce democracies.

Fein addresses the supposed need to fight wars for resources by pointing out and documenting that “neither the United States nor any other country has ever been denied access to strategic materials or trade by so-called ‘enemies’.”

But Fein addresses the moral argument only by shifting it to a legal one. What if it were legal to fight wars for humanitarian purposes? I think the moral argument leads to a position that lines up closely with Fein on U.S. wars of benevolence but parts with his position on something else: the United Nations.

The United States has proven time and time again that humanitarian justifications for war are, in its hands, purely justifications for something else entirely. Clearly the people of the world would be better off if all wars were forbidden, at least until a truly representative and truly international government were able to produce something that could honestly be called a police action.

Which brings us to the United Nations. Fein would eliminate it, all of it, on the grounds that it violates the U.S. Constitution in granting presidents the power to go to war on the authorization of the UN Security Council without a declaration of war from Congress. Fein’s Exhibit 1: The Korean War.

But the UN Charter does not say a president has the power to make war, and blaming the UN Charter for presidential power-grabs and congressional subservience is too easy. That’s a fight between presidents and congresses.

Nor do I think that such a defect in one chapter of the UN Charter, if it existed, would be grounds for scrapping the United Nations entirely. The United Nations rightly opposed the launching of our wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Its primary deficiency is in a lack of independent power, not in any conflict with the U.S. Constitution.

Elsewhere, Fein tosses “regulation,” “protectionism,” “welfare programs,” and making “people financially dependent on government” into his lists of imperial evils, without explanation or elaboration.

And while he would end all wars of aggression, Fein favors a form of defense that sounds more like retaliation than defense: The United States “should . . . threaten destruction worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki to any country that attacks or begins an attack against the American people.”

And for non-state actors, Fein favors secret assassination squads, as long as they are approved by Congress and later made public.

I highlight all of these areas of possible disagreement in order to say that, nonetheless, I would trade the government we have for Fein’s in a heartbeat. I may oppose assassination squads, but I — like Fein — would accept them as a substitute for war without hesitation.

And if Americans had any notion of what war means, all such discussions would take on a very different form. As it is, people who cheered for Fein when he spoke in support of impeaching George W. Bush will now denounce him for disagreeing with the same abuses of power when engaged in by Barack Obama.

Having been established as an enemy of Obama, not to mention Social Security and healthcare, Fein will be lumped with the Teabaggers and forgotten there by millions of well-meaning people. But we ignore Fein’s warnings at our own peril, and that of the rest of humanity.

David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press.  You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

That was the situation before the blood started flowing. Charlottesville was the kind of town where murder was so rare that any occurrence of it was publicly discussed and mourned in detail. Everyone felt for the victims, whether they knew them or not. All of that has changed.

The change came when I learned that the good people of Charlottesville, some 40,000 strong, had gotten together, pinched pennies, pooled their resources and come up with a fund of $345 million for murdering strangers. How did this happen? No great initiative and organizing was required. It was more an act of absent-mindedness. In fact, if asked, a strong majority of the people of Charlottesville will tell you that they oppose what they’re doing, and most of those will explain that they aren’t entirely clear what it is they’re doing in any detail. Nonetheless, they’ve been pouring their money into this fund at an increased rate this past year and a half.

Allow me to explain. With the full support of Charlottesville’s and Virginia’s representatives in Congress, the people of Charlottesville have been billed or put into debt for payments of $115 million to cover the illegal wars being conducted in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. This price tag does not include interest payments on the debt, the cost of caring for veterans, or the impact of the wars on the price of fuel and the larger economy. By a very conservative estimate, we have to multiply the direct cost by at least three to arrive at a complete tally. Adding reparations for what we’ve done would increase the total further.

These wars have killed over a million people already. Charlottesville’s proportional share in that scalp count is at least 115. For $345 million, we’ve killed 115 people. That’s one person for every three million dollars, or one person for every million dollars in direct payments into the wars. Imagine if the local Charlottesville media gave us saturation coverage of the life stories of each of those murder victims. Imagine if we knew their faces, their childhoods, their friends and loved ones. Imagine if rewards were offered on billboards for tips leading to the prosecution of their murderers.

Then there are the many people we could have saved from easily preventable deaths, in the United States and abroad, for each $3 million. There are kids without clean water, diseases without cures, and workplaces without safety standards. We’ve killed millions of people we haven’t even thought about. Imagine if we were thoroughly introduced to all of their stories. What if we’d put our whole $345 million into green energy and banned BP stations from Charlottesville? The National Priorities Project offers these alternatives for what Charlottesville has spent thus far. (I’ve multiplied all the figures, which were based on $115 million, times three to get a more complete count.) Instead of pointless, murderous, illegal war, Charlottesville could have chosen:

69,579 People Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year OR
5,871 Police or Sheriff’s Patrol Officers for One Year OR
6,435 Firefighters for One Year OR
36,411 Scholarships for University Students for One Year OR
64,764 Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550 OR
125,637 Children Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year OR
47,424 Head Start Slots for Children for One Year OR
63,840 Households with Renewable Electricity – Solar Photovoltaic for One Year OR
5,055 Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR
170,241 Households with Renewable Electricity-Wind Power for One Year

Remember, this is a town of 40,000 people. We don’t have 170,000 households to provide with green energy. We could have funded more than one of these categories to full capacity. We could have given solar and wind energy to every home and set a national standard, and still given all our kids college scholarships. All of them. Should we have done that or aided those least well off in the world? We would have to choose. Instead we’ve chosen mass murder.

But, I can hear Charlottesvillians remarking, we oppose the wars, there’s nothing we can do about it, and wars aren’t the same as murder. But, legally these wars are precisely the same as mass murder. Article VI of the US Constitution makes treaties that we are party to the supreme law of the land. One such treaty is the United Nations Charter. That charter makes war illegal except under two extraordinary circumstances. One would be if the Iraqis or Afghans or Pakistanis came here and attacked us. Then we would have the right to self-defense. (Hence the propagandistic need to portray a crime by a handful of Saudis as an act of war by Afghanistan and Iraq.) The other would be if the UN Security Council authorized an invasion, but in the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq it refused, and in the case of our drone war on Pakistan we’ve never asked.

Do the people of Charlottesville oppose what is being done with more of their money than anything else? We’re dumping ten times the war money into the Pentagon for its day-to-day affairs, and the war money is extra on top of that. There’s no money for schools or libraries, housing or parks. Why? Because more than half of every federal tax dollar that comes out of Charlottesville goes into the killing machine. The same is true for all the surrounding towns and counties, but internationally Charlottesville stands out as extraordinary. We pay more of our money into war-making than the rest of the world combined. This is why wealthy countries other than ours have healthcare, paid parental leave, paid vacations, free college, and so many other things we don’t even dream about or calculate the possible trade-offs for. And it’s why some poor countries have advantages our wealthy one can’t afford.

Do we oppose this? Well, some of us used to. When our congressman was a Republican, we denounced this course of action in the media, phoned his office, picketed his office, and went to jail for sitting in his office. But for the past year and a half, while the military budget and the war budget have both increased, we’ve said almost nothing. A small group of us have begun organizing protests at the new Democratic congress member’s office, but we’re the only ones he hears from. We’ve spent a good deal of time in his office on two occasions, and I think I have heard his phone ring there a total of twice. Nobody’s calling. And everyone who is not calling is communicating their approval of the mass murder of individual and remarkable and precious human beings.

Congressman Tom Perriello is about to vote for another $33.5 billion to escalate the war in Afghanistan. His phone number is (434) 293-9631.

David Swanson is the author of the book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. He is founder warisacrime.org formerly known as afterdowningstreet.org.

That torture has been pervasive I am persuaded of. That the bizarre torture memos crafted by John Yoo and Jay Bybee and their gang differ less than we might think from previous legal memos, laws, and treaties I accept to some extent. That the US prison and immigration systems fed into the new torture regime is beyond dispute. But Parry could have picked out many times and places to describe that did not use torture to the same extent. The racist and colonialist attitudes that Parry sees as a major support for torture are not constant. The fact that someone can make a twisted legalistic argument for torture does not make it legal beyond serious dispute. The new public acceptance and mainstreaming of torture in the United States has been a dramatic change, at least in awareness; and a dramatic change in a different direction, even as a reaction to this one, is possible.

As Parry notes, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights bans both torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. If we need to clarify that this ban allows no exceptions based on time or place or citizenship or any other factor, then let us clarify that and put it into our Constitution, our treaties, and our statutes, with a requirement to prosecute every act of conspiracy to engage in any such behavior. The world order will not collapse, at least not in a bad way.

But there is a more serious problem, I think. Namely, murder seems to be advancing in the U.S. toolkit as a replacement for torture. Both tools, murder and torture, produce exactly the same amount of useful intelligence. Both tools scare the hell out of people abroad and at home. Both tools serve to teach a domestic audience that certain types of people are not fully people and cannot be dealt with humanely. Both tools help to advance the further stripping away of civil liberties through fear and terror. The goals of torture that the CIA has advanced for decades of eliminating a person’s entire consciousness and identity, the mission of placing barbarians completely under control of the empire, what accomplishes this better than murder?

Look at all the hassle our government has been through trying to legalize and justify torture, not to mention the kidnappings and imprisonments necessary to engage in torture. We’ve seen CIA agents indicted in Italy and prosecutions of high level Americans opened in Spain. Former officials are facing civil suits in the United States for damages. Who needs the headaches? The Director of National Intelligence legalized the assassination of Americans abroad, and by implication any non-Americans as well, by going to Congress in February and announcing that such crimes would henceforth be legal. Easy peasey. No fuss, no muss. And if you want some future al-Libi to tell you that some future Iraq has scary scary weapons, don’t torture him; announce that he manages the stockpile and then put a bullet in his head.

President Obama has ordered the murder of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Like the innocent but tortured Abu Zubaydah (innocent at least of any of the crimes he was accused of), Awlaki is now the mastermind terrorist of the universe. And once he’s dead, who’s to say he wasn’t? Who can demand a trial or access to documents? He’ll be dead. See the beauty of it?

If the top mastermind is in Yemen, what the hell are we doing building a quagmire in Afghanistan? Don’t ask. But notice this: we have dramatically increased the use of missile strikes to assassinate in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we have increased the use of murderous night-time raids to such an extent that we now kill more civilians in that way than we do with drones. They’re the “wrong people,” or neighbors who came to help, or family members clinging to loved ones. Sometimes they’re young students with their hands tied behind their backs. Accidents will happen. But no U.S. officials’ future book tours are going to be interrupted by protesters, since there’s no torture involved. Civilization is on the march!

David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press.  You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book

A demonstrator is pulled off the stage after she approached Karl Rove in October 2008. Photo/AFP

When my friend Jodie Evans recently tried to make a citizen’s arrest of Karl Rove, he declared the Downing Street Minutes to be “a complete fabrication.” Of course, this “complete fabrication” was actually the minutes of an official meeting held by then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Blair and Bush were asked about the document at a White House press conference in June 2005 and did not deny its authenticity. But that document is one of the lesser pieces of evidence showing how we were lied into the Iraq War. I have laid out the overwhelming case in my book, Daybreak.

The worst damage done by our continuing to imagine that there’s some sort of debate over whether the war was really based on lies, is that we haven’t been able to focus on something more important.

Whether the war was based on lies (as of course it was) or on gospel truth or on the mistakes of a bunch of morons, has absolutely no bearing on the indisputable fact that the war was a criminal act of aggression.

Of course, lying to Congress or defrauding Congress is a felony, but it is one of the lesser crimes committed during this particular spree. Attacking another country, whether or not it has weapons of any kind, is the most serious crime on the books.

If, as all serious studies suggest, over a million people have been killed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, then there have been over a million murders. Whether anyone ever lied about anything has no bearing on that fact. The same goes, on a smaller scale thus far, for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Following World War II, the victors prosecuted the vanquished for the crime of aggression. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg concluded that aggressive war is “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson who made many statements stressing universality and opposing justice only for the currently vanquished nations. Jackson said:

“The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. The Charter of this Tribunal evidences a faith that the law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, ‘under … the law.’

“And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.”

Slowly, over the decades since Nuremberg, first with U.S. assistance and later despite U.S. resistance, progress has been made toward establishing international enforcement of the ban on aggressive war to which the world’s nations agreed in the United Nations Charter in 1945.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in 1998, places the crime of aggressive war under the court’s jurisdiction. However, the ICC is not to try anyone for the crime until the nations that are parties to the court agree on a definition and details. Those nations, which do not include the United States, will likely iron out those details this year.

Whether the court will then find the independence and integrity to prosecute the world’s most powerful empire will remain to be seen.

The Washington Post, which famously dismissed the Downing Street Minutes in 2005 as “old news” but now prints not one word opposing Rove’s “complete fabrication” comment, on Friday published a column by a former Bush-Cheney administration official arguing that the ICC should never prosecute wars of aggression. Doing so, he warns, might make it harder to commit such crimes in the future.

Hmm. Well, exactly.

Think I’m kidding?

Go read “International Criminal Court doesn’t need power over ‘aggression’” by Stephen G. Rademaker. He was an assistant secretary of state from 2002 to 2006 and now works for a lobbying company that has represented weapons companies and foreign nations in Washington, D.C., including the nation of Serbia.

Rademaker begins his free advertisement for international criminality thus:

“The International Criminal Court’s member countries will gather in May in Kampala, Uganda, where they will spend most of their conference considering whether to expand the court’s jurisdiction to include the ‘crime of aggression.’ This is a bad idea on many levels.”

Those quotation marks around “crime of aggression” have arisen in the United States since the days of Nazi prosecutions, of course, as Robert Jackson’s rhetoric has faded from memory. Skipping down a little, Rademaker writes:

“Proponents say that previous efforts to prevent war, such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the U.N. Charter of 1945, failed because they were toothless. Empower this court to prosecute national leaders who order acts of aggression, they contend, and aggression finally will be deterred.”

Has anyone made that promise? I haven’t seen it. But we prosecute petty crimes by little people without demanding proof that all such future crimes will be deterred. We take the serious possibility that some of them might be deterred as sufficient grounds to prosecute.

And if certain individuals declared that they would not be parties to our body of domestic law, they would not gain immunity. On the contrary, they would be carefully watched and aggressively prosecuted. If, on the international level, the ICC had existed at the time of Nazi Germany, and that nation had chosen not to support the court, the court could still have prosecuted Germans.

In fact, we invented a court out of nothing purely for the purpose of prosecuting Germans. Yet Rademaker’s concern is that the world’s leading criminal aggressors might be prosecuted in the future despite choosing not to support the ICC:

“The ICC would be empowered to prosecute the leaders of any country that commits aggression on the territory of a member. In the future, then, although Russia is not a member, its leaders could be prosecuted for acts of aggression against a member, such as Georgia.

“Likewise, the leaders of Israel (another non-member) could be prosecuted for future operations on the territory of members such as Jordan. For the United States, a non-member, there would be implications any time the use of force was contemplated on the territory of a member.

“To put this in perspective, consider some of the countries where we have used force in the past two decades: Panama, Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan. All are ICC members today.”

And Iraq joined in 2005 and then un-joined under U.S. pressure, pressure that will not always remain, pressure to prevent prosecution of a crime for which there is likely to be no statute of limitations.

Rademaker is apparently concerned that the United States would have to cease invading countries. He is remarkably honest about the status quo he hopes to preserve:

“Washington is confident that it did not commit aggression in those countries. But Washington has always been the sole judge of whether a particular use of force was justified under international law. If the ICC acquires jurisdiction to prosecute aggression, the court would be responsible for deciding whether it agrees, say, that a Manuel Noriega or Slobodan Milosevic provoked U.S. action against him.”

Actually, this would only be the case if, bizarrely, the national parties to the ICC decide to add a loophole for cases of “provocation.” The U.N. Charter does not. The ICC would not have to judge whether irrelevant U.S. excuses justified U.S. crimes. The ICC would simply have to prosecute the crimes.

Rademaker continues: “Should it disagree with the U.S. judgment, the court would be empowered to prosecute the ‘perpetrators.’ Certainly these would include the president, the secretary of defense and other top officials such as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Members of Congress who voted to authorize or fund the operation also would be potential defendants.”

This is supposed to sound very different in American ears from how it would sound if written about top Nazi officials. Justice Jackson’s wise point a half century back was that it shouldn’t. It should sound like a resounding warning to members of Congress faced yet again in the coming weeks with the demand to further fund two wars of aggression and various aggressive strikes by unmanned drones.

It should even sound like a warning, a moral if not a legal one, to those of us who vote for those Congress members and fail to pressure them to obey the law.

Rademaker adds: “The Obama administration took office eager to ease U.S. hostility toward the ICC. But the potential effects of this proposal have prompted the administration to argue against it. At a minimum, U.S. officials have said, a U.N. Security Council finding that aggression occurred should be required before the ICC could act.”

At a minimum? The United States has veto power in the U.N. Security Council and has never been shy about using it. Obama (and Rademaker) are asking for the power to veto the prosecution of U.S. officials. If that’s a minimum request, I’d hate to imagine what the maximum would have been.

Rademaker goes on: “With such pleas apparently falling on deaf ears, the administration reportedly is debating whether to seek some sort of compromise in Kampala. It would be a mistake, however, for Washington to bargain on the margins of the conference. While empowering the ICC to prosecute aggression would be bad for the United States, it would be worse for the court itself.”

Ahhh. Yes, of course. Our concern is for the well being of the court, not our own immunity. We wish the court well and want to look out for it. We’d be willing even to “liberate” it, perhaps, if needed.

Rademaker then cites how complicated these matters are: “The ICC is manifestly incapable of exercising the responsibility and making the judgments that would come with jurisdiction over aggression.

“If Russia were to attack Georgia again, would the ICC really indict Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev? Or would it concoct a reason to look the other way? Which would be worse for the court’s credibility and prospects for long-term success?”

The answer to that one is easy. If the court is to gain credibility and succeed, it must be authorized to prosecute the most serious international crimes, and it must do so.

And those steps must be taken in that order. If there were no possibility of the second step following the first, then nothing of what Rademaker has written above about dangers to U.S. officials would make any sense.

But because there is a possibility of the second step following the first, Rademaker’s warmhearted concern for the court expressed here is a steaming pile of yellowcake.

David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press.  You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book

Two observations. First, people, Congress, the White House, state governments, corporations, media outlets, and the Federal Elections Commission are, by and large, treating an unpopular and unconstitutional ruling as the law of the land, even though the ruling itself and others like it make amending the Constitution to fall in line with either the popular will or the obvious meaning of the existing Constitution more difficult — yet still doable and desirable.

Second, if one political party in Washington, no matter which one, moves against the Citizens United ruling, and the other does not, then the followers of those parties across the country will obey the dictates of their rulers exactly as if the polling cited above had never happened. After all, this is what we just witnessed with healthcare. Every Democrat backed a bill that, just by looking at the text of it, one would have guessed was Republican. And every Republican condemned the bill as communism right on que. Now, anything could happen. The states could lead the way, with voices from both parties, as is beginning. But the likely scenario is, of course, that Democrats in Washington will push minor halfway fixes, and Republicans in Washington will oppose them. So, keep the strength of the polling above in mind, because you will never see the media publish it again.

Meanwhile, the disaster of the Citizens United ruling is continuing to spread. And, for the most part, state governments are working to conform to the disaster. Many states are beginning to push back in minor ways. Montana is pushing back a little more strongly:

“Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock essentially dared opponents to sue the state, vowing to continue enforcing restrictions on corporate political spending that date back to scandals involving mining interests nearly a century ago. Testifying before Congress in February, Bullock said the state’s corporate spending limit ‘has served us well and never been challenged.’”

Until now.

“A Denver-based conservative group took up Bullock’s challenge this month. The Western Tradition Partnership joined with a Montana paint company owner in filing a lawsuit in state court challenging Montana’s limits on corporate expenditures as an unconstitutional ban on political speech.”

Courts across the country are being called into action. Federal court rulings have decided that there are no limits on corporate spending, but limits still remain on spending by political parties. But those limits will vanish, too, as soon as the case reaches the Supreme Court, also known as these people.

And thanks to the fine work already performed by the Supremes, we may soon see state judges universally cut from the same corporate cloth. And, as an added improvement, the corporations on whom there are already no limits include the health insurance corporations, which will have hundreds of billions of new dollars coming in by mandated purchase of their products.

Still, even with the current imbalance restricting political parties and not corporations, it is the political parties that hold the most influence. The insurance corporations were not able to buy Democratic congress members away from their party leaders. Nobody votes against war money or anything else, no matter how unpopular, unless their party leaders give them permission.

And yet, when the limits are lifted on parties, the uproar will not match that in response to Citizens United, because very few people will notice that corporate money buys off two parties much more easily than it could buy off 535 independent representatives.

David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting davidswanson.org/book.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich voted for a health insurance bill he believed would deprive more people of healthcare (and wealth and homes), because fraudulent reports had convinced his constituents of the opposite. The peace movement was defunded in November 2008, because of a fraudulent presidential election campaign. 71 percent of Americans believe Iran has nuclear weapons. Forty-one percent of Americans think the quality of the environment is improving. Has the power of the corporate media to overwhelm all before it begun to sink in yet?

ACORN’s funders didn’t have to run and hide because of a bunch of laughably bad lies, but they were afraid. The most common excuse of progressive congress members for anything they do is fear of the media. The peace movement didn’t have to shut down, but its funders had used war as a criticism of Republicans; opposing war for its own sake was secondary, and their televisions told them peace had arrived. Kucinich could have stuck to his No vote on healthcare, but he probably wouldn’t have lasted long in Congress. We don’t have to be suckered by comically manipulative war news, but all the big media outlets want war — and the Democratic-party outlets especially favor war now. Fox News could not have created the Teabaggers on its own, but MSNBC and the Democratic blogosphere spend a majority of their time focused on Teabaggers and Republicans because it unites their viewers/readers against something uglier than elected Democrats, never mind that in Washington the Democrats technically have all the power.

We need independent media. Is that not yet crystal clear? The strongest grassroots community organization in the country, ACORN, has been swatted away like a fly through the endless airing of fraudulent, badly edited, and irrelevant, but salacious video clips. Elected officials or electoral candidates succeed or fail at the whim of the media cartel. And the biggest lies of all are buried so deeply beneath the hot news stories that they’re almost impossible to see. Does or does not Iran possess nuclear weapons? That question hides the insidious assumption that if a nation possesses nuclear weapons, then our nation can and should launch an illegal war of aggression against it. Or at least our nation should have a debate over how best to take action against our “enemy,” a debate that will represent us all because it will include two political parties.

This is the biggest lie of them all: the system works. Vote for this corporatist war party or that warmongering corporate party, and you will have played your role well. The system works. The president makes the laws. The Congress gets in the way. The two parties are significantly different from each other and represent our views. News stories that include the views of both parties are complete and admirable journalism. The journalism itself has no viewpoint at all. The role of a citizen is to support politicians and parties.

Imagine if Bush wanted to try alleged terrorists in court (as in fact he did). All the Republicanites would have cheered (as in fact they did). Imagine if Bush had pushed a health insurance bill written by the industry and had cut deals with the insurance and drug companies. Imagine if Republicans had called a private program for 3 percent of Americans a “public option”. All the Democratites in the country would have denounced the whole thing as a scam. The problem with “balanced” reporting is that those who consume it pick one of the two partisan positions presented and follow it as if they’d thought of it themselves. This mindless obedience is going to destroy us all.

We need independent media, meaning sources of news that are independent of either political party. We could easily find the money to create it right now if we chose to make that a priority. We will do so or we, and this republic, and the world as we know it will perish . . . in horrible pain, with a grin on our face.

David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting davidswanson.org/book.