Maine Owl

Not a dove. He was for the war before he said it couldn't be won. Having seen War Made Easy, I recall the footage of Cronkite celebrating the bombers Solomon mentions. In fact it was the first thing I thought about when I'd heard he died and while his famous February 1968 quote,

Walter Cronkite: But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

played over and over.

This doesn't diminish my admiration for his deep questioning on nuclear weapons during his later life (previous post). People are complicated. Life is complicated.

U.S. arsenal caused Cronkite deep worry

In the flood of reports and stories on the passing of the great newsman Walter Cronkite, I barely see mention that in his later years he campaigned on behalf of nuclear disarmament.

"Frankly, I'm worried," he said in 2005 during a 3-minute audio commentary you may play below, "It seems that the United States and the other nuclear weapons states are trying to evade their obligations and responsibilities under [the] critical Non-proliferation Treaty."

The commentary was part of a radio documentary on the six decades since Hiroshima that was produced by Reese Ehrlich and distributed by Public Radio International (PRI). You may find a link to play the full audio from this excellent program at that link.

Play the 3-minute commentary here:


A written version is HERE.

Walter Cronkite (2005): The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ? the hibakusha ? have continually warned, "Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist." In the end, I believe this is the most important lesson of Hiroshima. We must eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.

The best security, perhaps the only security, against nuclear weapons being used again, or getting into the hands of terrorists, is to eliminate them. Most of the people of the world already know this. Now it is up to the world?s people to impress the urgency of this situation upon their governments. We must act now. The future depends upon us.

Anything less would be to abandon our responsibility to future generations.

The struggle vets returning from often multiple tours face just begins when they get home. That is discussed in devastating detail in an hour-long talk given a couple of months ago by Aaron Glantz and broadcast recently by University of California television. UCTV is available locally if you have Dish Network. There will be several re-broadcasts over this coming weekend. Or, just watch the full program on YouTube:


Author Aaron Glantz reported extensively from Iraq during 2003-05. His book, The War Comes Home, is the first systematically "to document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan."

Here are two quotes readers of this blog and its precursors may remember:

The Owl, March 2003: This war will perhaps be the worst cynical betrayal of the fighting men and women in the military in U.S. history. The American people need to know that it is only the peace movement that truly supports the troops. The only troop support that means a damn thing is stopping the war in the first place. This is a strong statement given the experience of Vietnam and the first Gulf War, but I believe that this is true. Our troops will be thrown into a battlefield where they will be exposed to deadly toxins. The deleterious effects on our troops and the Iraqi population of extensive use of depleted uranium munitions in the first Gulf War is only now coming to light. The new war will feature a ten-fold increase in the release of these toxins. A great deal of information on the suffering of our own veterans may be found at this website: http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/.

The imperialism of Bush and his lieutenants is a BETRAYAL of the troops and the American people, while they engender a false image that American troops do not care about human life. This image of our troops as storm troopers enforcing imperial policy, like it or not, will take a quantum leap in currency after an attack on Iraq. We will have lost any remaining legitimacy we have in using our military might against actual terrorists (not that I agree this has been the U.S. aim at any point, but post-9/11 legitimacy in the eyes of the world will have been squandered totally). None of this weight do I want our great country, our troops, and all of our people to have to bear.

This one perhaps gets to the issues vets would soon face even more poignantly:

Stan Goff, Orono, Maine, November 2005: I don't think any of us want to get to the point where we can clearly demonstrate that Iraq is Vietnam. We don?t need another wall with 58,000 more names on it. We don't need another generation that melts down in the face of this war. And we're already seeing it happen?.Some of us who have lived to my age, or maybe even a little older--we were so hopeful that this would never happen again--that we would never do this to another generation of young people?. And we're doing it right now,? you know,? we're doing it right now. We're killing 'em, we're maiming 'em, we're sending 'em home crazy. And we're not doing anything for 'em when they get back. It's the same thing again.

There is no credit taken here for predicting the future. If anything, the picture Aaron Glantz paints is far more devastating than any of us predicted.

But now President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates are escalating the war in Afghanistan and want an expansion of the Army by 30,000 troops. Very little is happening to resist. Our peace groups are engaged in some protest planning, but it's very, very quiet so far. It is hard to engage protest against a president in whom many folks want to believe, even though they steadfastly were anti-Bush. Meanwhile, the stories of escalation and civilian killing on one end and despair of vets on the other are afterthoughts on the news, if they are reported at all.

Caution: graphic details of a mass killing


In this lengthy segment from Democracy Now! for July 13, 2009, an extended excerpt from Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death by Irish filmmaker Jamie Doran is included. The description of what happened to perhaps 2000 prisoners of an Afghan warlord and U.S. ally, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who were packed into shipping containers near Mazāri Sharīf in November 2001 is chilling and sickening.

General Dostum was closely allied with U.S. Special Forces during the first U.S.-Afghan war in the Fall of 2001. That was interesting considering he had been closely allied with the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan two decades ago.

I won't rehash the story of how Dostum massacred the prisoners, told very capably on Democracy Now! yesterday, HERE. But I will say that it's quite instructive that now all of a sudden there is some interest in this and how the U.S. war was fought during November 2001. It's a prime example of how a horrendous story of conduct of war even can hit a mainstream outlet in the U.S. yet still be deep-sixed by disinterest if the White House wants it that way.

In August 2002, Newsweek printed the explosive cover story, "The Death Convoy Of Afghanistan", by Babak Dehghanpisheh, John Barry, and Roy Gutman that led, "Witness Reports And The Probing Of A Mass Grave Point To War Crimes. Does The United States Have Any Responsibility For The Atrocities Of Its Allies?" The overall media response less than one year after 9/11 was a big yawn.

Perhaps the U.S. public mood at the time was none too sympathetic towards people of the Middle East and South Asia who are seen as irreconcilable hostiles. Even today, some commenters at an ABC News blog entry on the new probe into the killings may share the feelings of "Dan," who wrote,

...I have no problem with Dostum killing a couple of thousand Taliban fighters. If they were still alive, we'd either be fighting them in Afghanistan or arguing about what to do with them (as we're now doing with respect to the Guantanimo detainees). I remember reading about this in '02, thinking, "just as well". We'd probably have been better off if even more Taliban fighters had been eh "massacred". There is no reforming religious fanatics. ...

This kind of comment is pretty typical in America. The thinking goes something like this--we were wronged by bad people who fill a whole section of the world so it doesn't matter what we do over there, just so we kill and kill and kill and kill as much as possible in order to protect ourselves. You'll see this kind of thinking used again and again.

The investigation of the Convoy Massacre ordered by President Obama? As Glen Greenwald has written about the Obama approach, there seemingly is no transgression of law that politically is worth doing anything about. Obama is afraid of the jingoist consensus reflected in the attitudes described above. So like Greenwald, I'll believe there is justice when I see it.

Atrios asked a pertinent question today, What Are We Doing There?, on the occasion of the death of Vietnam architect Robert S. McNamara. McNamara famously used hindsight to re-evaluate the War while making a few apparently repentant gestures during the remainder of his life after government service, as portrayed in the Errol Morris film, The Fog of War.

Getting an answer to that question--What are we doing there?--requires, I believe a deep run through U.S. history and close observation of what the U.S. actually is building with the 12-figure War Supplementals that seem to sail through Congress no matter which party is in charge. I looked inside the last one a bit HERE, and the one previous HERE. These things are laden with money for base construction, special forces/covert war, training and equipping puppet armies that will attack their own people, and tons of other "sweeteners" thrown in to make sure enough Congresspeople will vote for them.

To complete the answer requires an explanation of what happens once these appropriations are made. Fortuitously a John Pilger interview broadcast today on Democracy Now! provides a pretty accurate such picture.

Pilger explains that the Obama Administration has created a "historic disaster" with it's "AfPak" adventure. According to Pilger, "up to 2 million refugees in Northwestern Pakistan" have been "caused by the attacks by the Pakistanis government, egged on and paid for by the Obama administration."

Pilger decries the use of "electronic battlefield weapons such as drones and other unmanned vehicles" and states that "drones have killed according to the Pakistani authorities, ... something like 700 civilians since the inauguration of President Obama."

The long-term goal?

John Pilger: The Afghanistan War, so called, is really about building as Gates, Robert Gates the Secretary has said, has virtually admitted, is about building a number of secured permanent bases throughout that country and reinforcing the major facility at Bagram. The United States has no intention of getting out of Afghanistan. It is building one of its fortress embassies in Kabul, just as it is building a $1 billion embassy in Islamabad, just as it has built an enormous fortress in Baghdad. Whatever happens to American ground troops who eventually, yes, will be withdrawn, will make no difference to the significance of the American presence, the American, the violent American presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in Iraq. These are seen as places where the United States will have a permanent presence to be able to?a strategic position?where it will be able to monitor, and perhaps influence, and perhaps control the influences of its imperial rivals.

So it's about strategic control, especially with respect to "imperial rivals." Presumably this means European rivals, China, Russia, Iran, maybe even India. This area will be the nexus of resource struggles of coming decades. The U.S. appears to be planning to be ready.

Bruce K. Gagnon has this interesting information today:

Bruce Gagnon: The drone market is exploding and there is an effort underway to turn Brunswick Naval Air Station into a UAV testing center after the base closes next year.

Informed sources tell us that the plans for Maine include drones from BNAS flying up and down the Maine coast peering at boats and people for "homeland security" reasons. [Maine Commissioner of Economic and Community Development] John Richardson has been a key proponent of this plan. Now is the time for Mainers to know about this and to speak up.

Bruce also links to THIS story today:

Top judge: 'use of drones intolerable'
Unmanned weapons are condemned by Lord Bingham as 'beyond the pale' | The Independent | By Robert Verkaik, Legal Editgor | Monday, 6 July 2009

The use of unmanned drones as weapons of war in conflicts around the world has been called into question by one of Britain's most senior judges. Lord Bingham, until last year the senior law lord, said that some weapons were so "cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance".

In an interview with the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, Lord Bingham compared drones, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza, with cluster bombs and landmines.

His comments are bound to intensify calls for new international rules to protect civilian populations from arbitrary attacks launched by the pilotless craft.

Lord Bingham asked in the interview, which addressed the issue of the state being bound by the rule of law: "Are there, for example, and this goes to conflict, not post-conflict situations, weapons that ought to be outlawed? From time to time in the history of international law various weapons have been thought to be so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance. I think cluster bombs and landmines are the most recent examples.

"It may be ? I'm not expressing a view ?- that unmanned drones that fall on a house full of civilians is a weapon the international community should decide should not be used."

Bruce has up a video from a New Mexico teevee news report showing drone camera footage. It's an amazing report, mentioning that the pilots operating these killing machines from half-way around the world can "witness the aftermath in great detail" before knocking off for the day to "go to [the] kids' soccer game."

Indeed, "the aftermath." The report doesn't offer details, but they must be bad. After watching the little figures and seemingly toy-sized vehicles get blown to bits in the footage, it's little wonder the Air Force has "brought in more counselors and chaplains to help crews deal with particularly traumatic missions." Imagine how "traumatic" the missions must be for those upon whose heads the bombs are exploded!

Here's the bottom line as far as I'm concerned: The U.S. has invaded and occupied the lands in which it is chopping up innocent, defenseless people with these diabolical killing machines. Every decent citizen of the countries under attack now has the right to defend themselves against the U.S. and its allies. Of course, being vastly weaker in military equipment and technology will lead to extreme cost to these populations. Therefore, it is the duty of every decent American to protest our government's actions and stop these unnecessary wars, in order to prevent the loss of so many lives.

Some related posts:

• Drone stories of death
• Pakistan targets: orphans without shelter
• Drones of death
• Reaping Mother's Day in Iraq
• Where is Sidney Freedman when you need him?