THE HANDSTAND

may 2005


DOREMUS OBSERVES : MATTERS OF INTEREST

Doremus Jessup, editor of the Fort Beulah The Daily Informer, in Sinclair Lewis' famous book "It Can't Happen Here", at its conclusion, "drove out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of freedom.....still Doremus goes on, into the sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die......



US War Crimes and the Legal Case for Military Resistance

by Paul Rockwell
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0503-25.htm

"Whensoever the general Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force." Thomas Jefferson

May 10th is a national day of action for GI resisters. A newly formed group, Courage-To-Resist, is organizing veterans, military families, and community activists in a campaign to support military objectors. Demonstrations to support sailor Pablo Paredes, who faces a court martial in San Diego May 11th, are in the making.

On December 6, 2004, Navy Petty Officer Pablo Paredes refused to board his Navy ship. In his press statements, he called attention to the intrinsic wrongs of war, the gross illegality of the invasion of Iraq, and the ongoing pattern of U.S. atrocities in Iraq.

Kevin Benderman is also facing a court martial at Fort Stewart, Georgia, May 11th. On January 5th, 2005, Benderman refused to deploy for a second tour of duty with his Third Infantry Army Division in Iraq. (Seventeen other soldiers from his unit went AWOL. Two tried to kill themselves). Benderman witnessed atrocities and unforgettable brutality in Iraq. "U.S. military personnel," he said, "are increasingly killing non-combatants. On my last deployment in Iraq, elements of my unit were instructed by a Captain to fire on children throwing rocks at us."

Both Paredes and Benderman are conscientious objectors to war. So far the military has refused to acknowledge their acts of conscience. Both resisters face jail time and lost of pay and benefits.

The moral justification for refusing to participate in unjust wars is not difficult to grasp. We tend to forget, however, that acts of conscience are also affirmations in the rule of law. Camilo Mejia, Stephen Funk, Jeff Paterson (Gulf War objector), Carl Webb, Abdulla Webster, Michael Hoffman, Jimmy Massey, David Blunt, Aidan Delgado, Diedra Cobb, Jeremy Hinzman, Brandon Hughey, and dozens of other war resisters are not only heroes of peace, they are vindicators of the Constitution, the U.N. Charter, Nuremberg Conventions and the Geneva Conventions as well.

American commanders promote a widespread misconception that, once American youth sign an enlistment contract, they are obligated to participate in any kind of war, whether it is based on fraud or truth, whether it is a preemptive invasion or a genuine war of self-defense. In a "voluntary military," Rumsfeld said at a recent press conference, soldiers have no right to complain.

That's preposterous. No soldier owes absolute allegiance to any military system. The prevailing doctrine of blind obedience is a fascist, not a democratic, doctrine of military service. Of course all military systems require discipline, and all operate through a chain of command. But the legal authority of command depends on adherence to the rule of law. As sailor Pablo Paredes noted recently, the U.S. Military Code of Justice says that, while soldiers are obligated to obey all legal orders, the same soldiers have a right, even a duty, to disobey illegal orders. That is the essence of the legal case for military resistance.

Once unrestrained leaders, in their lust for power and world domination, place our military system beyond domestic and international law, the obligation of soldiers to serve the military in its state of lawlessness is dissolved. Long ago Thomas Jefferson captured the spirit of legal resistance when he wrote: "Whensoever the general Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force." ...

In the annals of collective terror and reprisal, the U.S. siege of Fallujah, a city leveled by U.S. air power, ranks with the fascist bombing of Guernica in Spain in 1937.

Prior to the onslaught against Fallujah, U.S. commanders drove nearly 200,000 Fallujans out of their own city, bereft of housing, food and water. Those who remained in their homes were trapped in a rain of death. The siege began with an attack on the Fallujah general hospital. Injured patients were forced out of their beds. Doctors were prevented from treating, even reporting, casualties. Today Fallujah is a wasteland. Robert Worth in the New York Times reports, in the aftermath of the bombing campaign: "Cars sit on the roofs of buildings. Lamp posts lie at odd angles. Fire has blackened the face of building after building." No type of building-mosques, homes, medical facilities-was exempt from aerial destruction. Five-hundred pound bombs are utterly indiscriminate in their effects. A 1,000-pound bomb obliterated the city's rail station, a transfer point for all Iraq. Another strike turned a small hospital into rubble. Mosques were assaulted. Entire neighborhoods were flattened. Fires raged throughout residential communities. American commanders openly declared that Fallujah needed to be "taught a lesson."

The people of Fallujah were murdered in their own homes, their own streets, their own hospitals and mosques - in their own homeland. They were not threatening any one else's soil. Unlike their invaders, they never possessed nuclear weapons. Unlike the CIA, they never aided Osama Bin Laden. They possessed no air force, no satellite systems, no anti-aircraft weapons, not even bullet-proof vests. Fallujah had no modern means of self-defense against industrial war and foreign aerial bombardment.
Paul Rockwell is a columnist for In Motion Magazine. He can be reached at
rockyspad@hotmail.com


VALUE ADDED TAX FOR AMERICANS TO FATTEN THE "P"RESIDENT'S WALLET:

In a stunning new development, the Bush Cheney Regime has proposed yet another plan to increase the tax burden on working class Republicans and Democrats.

In his column "New Bushonian Tax Fraud: Bush Cheney Regime Wants Consumption Tax to Stave Off Social Security Shortfalls," published on Al Martin Raw (almartinraw.com, economic forecaster Al Martin writes that the Bush Cheney Regime has decided to float the concept of a new tax. It will be packaged and sold to US citizens as a VAT Value Added Tax, Consumption Tax, or National Sales Tax and pro-Bush Republicans claim it will be necessary to keep the Social Security program solvent.

"In a CNBC interview on May 3rd, House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced that the primary concern of the Bush-Cheney regime is to guarantee Social Security benefits for those who are currently age 55 and above," Al Martin begins. "That is ALL that could be guaranteed under the current structure. And this shows the increasing disconnect between the pro-Bush faction and working class Republicans.


Learning To Be Stupid
In The Culture Of Cash

By Luciana Bohne
5-30-5
 
You might think that reading about a Podunk University's English teacher's attempt to connect the dots between the poverty of American education and the gullibility of the American public may be a little trivial, considering we've embarked on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been educated to such abysmal depths of ignorance.
"I don't read," says a junior without the slightest self-consciousness. She has not the smallest hint that professing a habitual preference for not reading at a university is like bragging in ordinary life that one chooses not to breathe. She is in my "World Literature" class. She has to read novels by African, Latin American, and Asian authors. She is not there by choice: it's just a "distribution" requirement for graduation, and it's easier than philosophy -she thinks.
The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and Shadows," set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class, including the English majors, can write a focused essay of analysis, so I have to teach that. No one in the class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies of general information from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism or fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is, and I supply it because it's impossible to understand the theme of the novel without a basic knowledge of that work - which used to be required reading a few generations ago. And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply US de-classified documents proving US collusion with the generals' coup and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende.
Geography, history, philosophy, and political science - all missing from their preparation. I realize that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" pointed out, and that they are paying for their own oppression. So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our government did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the same goes for most of Latin America. Then, one student asks, "Why?" Well, I say, the CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world in part because of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by the media, and cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know and the more indoctrinated they become, you get this national enabling stupidity to attain which they go into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, it would be funny.
Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war we are waging - an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical, and expensive war, which announces to the world the failure of our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping weakness of our economic system. Every man, woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted water is a murder - and a war crime. And it signals the impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic survival: analyzing and asking questions.
Let me put it succinctly: I don't think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-echelon jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses.
This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief and useless--except to the powers and interests that depend on it. When A Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these shores, writes the best-organized and most profound essay in English of the class, American education has something to answer for--especially to our youth.
But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both planned and instrumental. It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest intelligence sources. It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up during his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing the political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it protects.
Cultural fascism manifests itself in an aversion to thought and cultural refinement. "When I hear the word 'culture,'" Goebbels said, "I reach for my revolver." One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the university's role as a source of social criticism and political opposition. The order came to dismantle the departments of philosophy, social and political science, humanities and the arts--areas in which political discussions were likely to occur. The universities were ordered to issue degrees only in business management, computer programming, engineering, medicine and dentistry - vocational training schools, which in reality is what American education has come to resemble, at least at the level of mass education. Our students can graduate without ever touching a foreign language, philosophy, elements of any science, music or art, history, and political science, or economics. In fact, our students learn to live in an electoral democracy devoid of politics - a feature the dwindling crowds at the voting booths well illustrate.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity that the industrial revolution created, people first surrendered their minds or the capacity to reason, then their hearts or the capacity to empathize, until all that was left of the original human equipment was the senses or their selfish demands for gratification. At that point, humans entered the stage of market commodities and market consumers--one more thing in the commercial landscape. Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations.
Meanwhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a 10% cut across the board for all departments in the state - including education.
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.
http://www.marchforjustice.com/8.8.03.learning.php
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4428




PLEASE POST THIS WIDELY
RE:  House Bill 6008 - Depleted Uranium Testing
From: LeurenMoret - Independent Scientist and Radiation Specialist

Dear Rep. Denise Merrill and Sen. Toni Harp,

"What is depleted uranium?" will be the cover story on Wednesday morning in Crawford, Texas, home of Pres. Bush in the nationally circulated
LONE STAR ICONOCLAST.
http://www.iconoclast-texas.com/News/19news02.htm

This is a serious journalistic piece on the depleted uranium (DU) issue.  In this article, the Texas Legislature is asked to pass Connecticut Bill 6008.
Last week the Louisiana House voted 101-0 to pass it, just two weeks after it was introduced - with an implementation date of Oct. 2005.  The implementation date was changed from 2006 in the Connecticut bill, to 2005 in Louisiana, in order to meet the needs of 4500 troups returning to Louisiana from Iraq next October.      The bill is now on the way to the legislatures of Nevada, Washington, Montana, California, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, and Oregon.  As it continues on through the legislatures of other states, and we expect it will be all the states, it will be known as the "Connecticut Bill".  The importance of this bill will grow, as awareness of the DU issue increases, and out of concern for returning soldiers and veterans who might have been exposed during military service.

In August of 2004, Terri Jemison of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs told journalist Christopher Bollyn of the American Free Press, that "Gulf-era veterans" now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.  The number of soldiers on medical disability can only increase because of delayed effects from DU exposure, and as soldiers continue to serve in regions with increasing levels of DU contamination.  In fact, the interviews in the
ICONOCLAST article describe how atmospheric processes have now spread this radioactive poison dust around the world, exposing the global population. 

A new film on the DU issue,
BEYOND TREASON, is about to be released by the American Gulf War Veterans Association.  This documentary is nearly two hours long, featuring soldiers exposed to DU who are now very ill, veterans, scientists, and active military.  Connecticut Bill 6008 is presented in the film as "A call to arms"; to help the veterans, soldiers, and their families who are now suffering from the effects of DU exposure.  The Connecticut bill already has nationwide recognition, but this film willspread it like wildfire as millions who view it take action. 

This summer Gulf War veteran Dennis Kyne and I will be touring the cities, towns and villages of Connecticut with this film - to inform the students, veterans, citizens, and elected officials of Connecticut about the DU issue.  We hope you will join us, and that we will have the opportunity to meet some of you and many of your constituents as well as members of the mediain your state.  We would also like to thank, in person, Melissa Sterry and Pat Dillon for their courageous efforts to introduce this historic bill which already has nationwide recognition. 

I urge you to please hold an Appropriations meeting on this bill and vote to pass it on behalf of the soldiers, veterans, and their families in Connecticut. If this bill is neglected, it may be hard to explain to citizens not only in Connecticut but nationwide and internationally, why the Connecticut Legislaturefailed to pass this historic bill.

Please make Connecticut the nationwide leader in caring for our troops.  Our Patriots, who have put their lives on the line, deserve our full support, and they deserve your full support.

Leuren Moret
(510) 845-3139
2533 Dana Street
Berkeley, California  94704

<leurenmoret@yahoo.com>