Op-Ed

The killer was in his fourth deployment. He walked from his base to one village, then another, leaving behind the lunacy and spiritual wreckage of American foreign policy. Then he walked back to his base and calmly turned himself in.

I've been staring at the words for hours now:

"This terrible incident does not change our steadfast dedication to protecting the Afghan people and to doing everything we can to build a strong and stable Afghanistan." - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and their entire community." - deputy American ambassador to Afghanistan, James B. Cunningham

The words are meant to soften this PR disaster, to muffle the cries of the survivors.

"And obviously what happened this weekend was absolutely tragic and heartbreaking. But when you look at what hundreds of thousands of our military personnel have achieved under enormous strain, you can't help but be proud generally." - President Barack Obama

Well Mr. Limbaugh, you have certainly done it again. Although this is not the first time your mouth has spewed such hateful language perhaps it should be the last time you say anything more on your corporate sponsored program. Yes, that's right; it is time for you to resign or be put out to pasture. You didn't "apologize" for your remarks about Ms. Fluke until after it became apparent that your political torpedo missed its target completely and headed back to where it came from. Once you realized that your paycheck may be affected {as if you don't have enough money} you conveniently switched on the damage control to avoid further embarrassment and save your own miserable ass. This time however it has failed miserably and people from all sides of the aisle demand you leave before making anymore despicable comments. Some could argue that the words "slut" and "prostitute" could just as easily be leveled at you. After all don't you "earn" money by performing a certain "service". It never fails to amaze me that our capitalist system has allowed a scumbag like yourself to become very wealthy by just ranting all day against anything contrary to your personal views.

If Congressman Dennis Kucinich becomes simply Dennis Kucinich sans the "Congressman" his value to the peace movement need not diminish.

I admit it's been nice having someone in Congress who would say and do what he would. There have been and remain other relatively strong voices for peace, but none as strong as Kucinich's. His resolutions have forced the debates. His bills have changed the conversation. His questioning of witnesses has afflicted the comfortable while seeking to comfort the afflicted. Perhaps Congressman Norman Solomon will pick up the baton. Time will tell.

1. Iran has threatened to fight back if attacked, and that's a war crime. War crimes must be punished.
2. My television says Iran has nukes. I'm sure it's true this time. Just like with North Korea. I'm sure they're next. We only bomb places that really truly have nukes and are in the Axis of Evil. Except Iraq, which was different.

3. Iraq didn't go so badly. Considering how lousy its government is, the place is better off with so many people having left or died. Really, that one couldn't have worked out better if we'd planned it.

4. When we threaten to cut off Iran's oil, Iran threatens to cut off Iran's oil, which is absolutely intolerable. What would we do without that oil? And what good is buying it if they want to sell it?

5. Iran was secretly behind 9-11. I read it online. And if it wasn't, that's worse. Iran hasn't attacked another nation in centuries, which means its next attack is guaranteed to be coming very soon.

6. Iranians are religious nuts, unlike Israelis and Americans. Most Israelis don't want to attack Iran, but the Holy Israeli government does. To oppose that decision would be to sin against God.

Elizabeth Holtzman knows something about struggles for justice in the U.S. government. She was a member of Congress and of the House Judiciary Committee that voted for articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon in 1973. She proposed the bill that in 1973 required that "state secrets" claims be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. She co-authored the special prosecutor law that was allowed to lapse, just in time for the George W. Bush crime wave, after Kenneth Starr made such a mockery of it during the Whitewater-cum-Lewinsky scandals. She was there for the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. She has served on the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, bringing long-escaped war criminals to justice. And she was an outspoken advocate for impeaching George W. Bush.

No mail on Saturday, maybe, but small-town police get armored personnel carriers? Let’s take a moment — in the context of these bitter times, and President Obama’s recent austerity budget proposal — to celebrate the questions the residents of Keene, N.H., are asking their city council about the kind of world we’re creating.

First of all, the grotesque insult of “austerity” in the shadow of limitless military spending is destroying our national sanity. And the proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, mental health services, environmental cleanup, National Parks programs and even, yeah, Saturday mail delivery are miniscule compared to the unmet social needs we haven’t yet begun to address in this country, in education, renewable energy and so much more. But we’re spending with reckless abandon to arm ourselves and our allies and provoke our enemies, and sometimes arm them as well, creating the sort of world no one (almost no one) wants: a world of endless war.

Twelve students at the University of Virginia on Saturday began a hunger strike for a living wage policy for university employees. They've taken this step after having exhausted just about every other possible approach over a period of 14 years. I was part of the campaign way back when it started. I can support the assertion made by hunger-striking student A.J. Chandra on Saturday, who said,

"We have not spent 14 years building up the case for a living wage. Rather, the campaign has made the case over and over again."

This is the latest in a long series of reports making the case.

Another striking student, David Flood, explained, "We have researched long enough. We have campaigned long enough. We have protested long enough. The time for a living wage is now."

After publishing this report I was contacted by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). The individual involved never returned my call. Instead I heard from Brian Hale who said he had been with Director Morton at the event recently held at the University of Virginia and discussed in my report. He told me that ICE in fact had nothing to do with contacting activists, that in fact Ed Ryan (who had contacted local residents from an ICE email address) actually worked for Federal Protective Services which used to fall under ICE and still has some ICE email addresses. I asked Hale, regardless of department, why any branch of Homeland Security was using our money to contact us in a manner that intimidated people out of exercising their First Amendment rights. Hale told me to ask Federal Protective Services (FPS).

It may have been the one and only thing which prevented an attack on Iran during the Bush years. Chairman of the Judiciary Committee John Conyers spent years fending off nationwide calls to impeach George W. Bush over the invasion of Iraq, the shredding of the Constitution after 9/11, and other high crimes and misdemeanors culminating in a summer of 2008 "non-impeachment impeachment hearings," in which witnesses such as Rep. Brad Miller, Rep. Maurice Hinchey, Rep. Walter Jones, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, Vincent Bugliosi and many others came together to implore the committee to bring articles of impeachment.

At one point Conyers closed to the committee room to any further audience members, prompting calls of "shame! shame! shame!" from the packed halls of the Rayburn Building to which people had traveled from across the country, but established numerous closed-circuit television viewing rooms for the public in other parts of the Hill.

“Thirty seconds to zero . . . six, five, four, three, two, one.”
Suddenly a big orange blossom fills the screen, accompanied by ukuleles and lovely — I mean Strangelovian — Polynesian music. The blossom is actually Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb blast, the largest U.S. test ever, detonated over Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954.

This is a few minutes into Nuclear Savage: The Island Experiments of Secret Project 4.1, one of the most disturbing documentaries I’ve ever seen, and one of seven feature-length films that are part of Chicago’s fourth annual Peace on Earth Film Festival, Feb. 23-26, at the Chicago Cultural Center. The event, once again, is free of charge.

Peace on earth?

The film festival seeks to “enlighten and to empower individuals, families and communities to step out of the ignorance of conflict . . .”

I take a deep breath and think about Nuclear Savage, a film by former Greenpeace activist Adam Jonas Horowitz, which opens up one of the hidden horrors of American history — analogous to our history of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow — but perpetrated on the far side of the world, with nuclear weapons.