Op-Ed

The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs is prepared to follow in Dick Cheney's footsteps and shoot a friend in the face. I just sat through a hearing on Iran, and there is apparently universal bipartisan agreement in the committee that Iranians feel kindly toward Americans and welcome them as friends, and that Iranians should be brutally punished by the toughest economic sanctions possible. This simple truth went unstated: sanctions kill.

Who remembers this exchange on your television a decade back?

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."

--60 Minutes (5/12/96)

The following is a remarkable interview of Karen Kwiatkowski who retired from the active duty USAF as a Lieutenant Colonel in early 2003.  Her final assignment was in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Under Secretary for Policy Near East South Asia (NESA) Policy directorate.  In her responses below, Kwiatkowski describes the manipulation of intelligence on Iraq and Iran and what it would take to avoid an attack on the latter.

I began the interview by asking about Undersecretary of Defense for policy Douglas Feith, whose actions in the Pentagon in the lead-up to the Iraq War were the subject of a recent report by the Pentagon Inspector General.

SWANSON: Did the operations led by Doug Feith gather intelligence?

As war wages on in the Middle East, there's a heated battle on Capitol Hill over which political party's proposals to continue the war are more PRO-TROOP.  There's a raging debate over exactly what set of futile recommendations to the dictator living in the Vice President's mansion on Massachusetts Avenue amounts to the greatest PRO or ANTI TROOP agenda.

Leading contestants are:

1.-a Republican proposal to give Cheney and Bush another $93 billion off the books for the war, no questions asked.

2.-a Democratic proposal to give Cheney and Bush another $93 billion off the books for the war but reauthorize the war with new lies in place of the old ones and/or ask the President to issue a public statement whenever he sends troops to Iraq without proper equipment or training, but not actually DO anything if the President chooses not to make such a public statement.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom when we learn That the Union makes us strong.

The House has just passed the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would effectively restore to Americans the internationally and domestically recognized but nonexistant right to form unions.  The US labor movement has invested untold millions in lobbying for this victory, and plans to invest untold more in trying to achieve the same victory in the Senate in the coming months.  Should that happen, the fate of the bill is already known.  Cheney has promised to have Bush veto it.

But that's not all Bush intends to veto.  Here's a recent Associated Press story:

FOR THE WASHINGTON STATE SENATE HEARING CALLING FOR THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES TO INVESTIGATE AND CONSIDER HEARINGS ON EVIDENCE THAT COULD LEAD TO THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH AND VICE-PRESIDENT RICHARD B. CHENEY

MARCH 1, 2007

Wow, the weapons heavies had to cut and run. A sense of enlightened self-interest - the same stuff that legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky was preaching in Chicago's Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood six decades ago - enabled a bunch of little guys out West to stare down the future of nuclear warfare, and win.

This unprecedented development must be savored. Divine Strake, the simulated nuclear blast the Defense Threat Reduction Agency was initially planning to set off nine months ago at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas - which would have raised a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud of god-knows-what - has been scrapped for good. After several postponements and a round of power-point presentations at various locations downwind of the test site that did nothing but fuel people's outrage, it ain't gonna happen.

On March 17, a huge mass of people will gather at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., and march from there to the Pentagon for the cause of impeachment and peace.  http://www.impeach07.org

A handful of pro-war people, some volunteer and some probably paid to be there, will stage a counter-demonstration.  This relatively tiny pro-death contingent will garner 50 percent of the media coverage if those on the side of peace do everything right.  If a single demonstrator for peace turns violent in any way, that story will take up far more than 50 percent of the news, and that news will hurt the cause of peace and justice.

Peace activist and gold star mother Cindy Sheehan and spokesman for a war-based oligarchy George Will both published columns this weekend arguing that non-Americans are human beings.  Sheehan's column was written in response to an Associated Press article that provided evidence that Americans disagree with this claim.  Will's column, meanwhile, adds to this evidence by demonstrating a failure to understand the very point he's arguing for.

I had a conversation this weekend with someone who believes that Bush and Cheney lied us into an aggressive war and will never end it, but who opposes impeachment because it's antagonistic, "violent," and "will leave blood on the floor."  I submit this as further evidence that Americans do not believe non-Americans are human beings.  If congressional hearings and potential hurt feelings are too violent, what would the ongoing slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis be… if they were humans?

A growing network of organizations and individuals has launched a new campaign to pursue the immediate impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney through widespread public protest, creative dissent, media activism, education, and coordinated lobbying. Members of the Impeach07 campaign believe that Bush and Cheney have committed high crimes and misdemeanors, including - among many others - misleading the nation into an aggressive war, spying in open violation of the law, and sanctioning the use of torture.  The campaign is demanding that Congress Members hold Cheney and Bush accountable through the Constitutional remedy of impeachment.

Impeach07 exists to organize people throughout the U.S. to demand that Congress impeach.  Newsweek reported in October that a majority of Americans favor impeachment, and in January that 58% said they wished the Bush administration were over. Impeach07 will draw on this energy to mobilize people from all walks of life.  As Howard Zinn, noted historian, has said, "Only a great popular upheaval can push both Republicans and Democrats into compliance with the national will."

It's an honor to be speaking with these panelists and it's great to be back in New York.  But I want to ask you one thing about New York, because there's something I heard Senator Hillary Clinton say and I want to know if it's true.  Is it true that if you live in New York you have to support this war?  Can you live in New York and work for peace?

That's what I thought.

I got up at 2 a.m. this morning in Charlottesville, Va., my town and the town of Thomas Jefferson, the man whose greatest fear for our republic was of elected despotism.  Jefferson and Madison and Mason and the others who drafted the most influential Constitution the world has seen, created a system of elections, but devoted much more attention and many more words to creating a system for maintaining our democracy in between elections.  They gave this essential power to the House of Representatives, as the branch most subject to popular control, and they called this power impeachment.